“Did you ever lend or give Jane Anne books?” she asked Rivers, at dinner, that night. “I ordered her a set of George Eliot’s novels once,” he said, “and all Scott’s. She’s clever enough to get something out of them. I see that from what she says to me about them. She is quite a superior girl.” “I don’t like her, and she doesn’t like me. And novels--that she only half understands--put things into her head that are better out of it. Now, suppose this girl, Jane Anne, were to write to my people and betray me,” she said, with a slightly simulated expression of apprehension. “Why should she betray you?” he said, showing by his slight accent on the betray that he thought it somewhat too forcible. “She would have no object.” “Oh no!” said Mrs. Elles. “I am not a criminal. And besides, there is no one for her to betray me to. I owe nobody any allegiance. I am perfectly independent. There is not a soul in the world who cares what becomes of me!” She sighed appropriately as she uttered this fiction, but if she had expected Mr. Rivers to openly commiserate her, she was disappointed. It was by no means the first time. Alastor always refused to take any interest in the fortunes of the Lady before she came to him. She wondered if he even took in the idea of the lonely and friendless condition. Did he really swallow the legend of herself that she had been at such pains to concoct and serve up to him when she first came? The lies she had told him, in the light of the new morality that her intercourse with his blameless rectitude had flashed upon her, began to weigh heavily upon her regenerate soul. He was so straight, so sincere, so guileless, so simple, she might tell him what she chose and he would credit her story as that of one holding the same rigid code of honour as himself. She was beginning to realize, as she had never realized before, what that code of honour--what every gentleman’s code of honour--was. It was not so much that it was wrong to lie, but it was a mark of ill-breeding, and her cheeks burned at the recollection of the imposition she had practised--was still practising--on this gentleman. He had asked her no questions, and she had told him lies! The only little point of comfort which she could wrest for herself from circumstances was the possibility that he had not chosen to burden his mind--full of tree and cloud forms, and such artistic lumber--with her story as she had related it to him. Was it likely that a man, with his strange and disconcerting capacity for the ignoring of details and all the minor facts of life, should have permitted anything so human and unimportant to make an impression on his mind? No, it had probably glided off him, while every mutation of the sunset they had watched together yesterday was indelibly fixed in his memory. Of what consequence were she and her trifling affairs in comparison? So she thought and hoped, in the new humility which her love for him had engendered in her.