She shuddered at the grimness of his accent--she apprehended his meaning only too well. She seemed to see him in her mind’s eye, as he would be henceforth, stooping, brooding, gloating over his work in the dell of Brignal, alone, as he was before she came there, and mildly, dully happy perhaps, as he may have been, before the Human Interest came to trouble him. And yet--“He does not want to let me see how he feels it,” was the secret consolation that lay all the while at the back of her thought, explaining his brusqueness, his taciturnity, his hardness, which her surface mind could not help resenting and deprecating. Her soul’s life, which was then at its lowest ebb, lived on that thought, and her body took courage from it. She walked into the Park almost briskly by his side, and when they had travelled a certain distance along the broad path, he made a significant movement of his hand towards her spectacles. “Can you take those things off?” he asked her, imperiously. She obediently doffed the symbol of her martyrdom and return to the paths of virtue, and handed them to him. He folded the spectacles and put them in his coat pocket. “The bill was only thirteen pounds,” she next remarked, holding out the notes he had lent her. “I had plenty of money of my own, so I return these.” The notes, too, he put into his pocket without comment. Then she said reproachfully:-- “Don’t you want to know my name?” He started. “Your name? That does not matter, does it?” “But you surely must know my name to write to me by?” “I am not going to write to you.” “Why not?” There was a sharp note of prescient anguish in her voice. “I am not good at writing letters.” “Ah, no, it isn’t that,” she answered sadly. “You mean of course that you want to go quite out of my life.” “What can I do?” “Do!” she repeated after him vaguely. Then--“Must you?” “Yes--I must.” “But it isn’t possible,--no, it isn’t possible!” she cried. “Quite possible,” he answered her doggedly. “I did not know you a month ago--I shall not know you a month hence, that’s all!” She wailed out gently, like a child. “But what am I to do? What are you going to do?” “I am going to do my work,” he answered her severely and coldly. “My work, that I have been letting go to the dogs lately. I shall paint and paint--like the very devil--as I did before you came. You must do that too. Work is the only thing, I find.” “Work, work, honest work!” she repeated mechanically. “But will you tell me what work I have to do? It is all very well for you--you speak as if you quite looked forward to your life without me--but I shall eat my heart out.” “Oh, people say that, but there is a certain savage pleasure in renunciation, as you will find.”