“I do not ask you to break your word to him, only tell him, tell him the truth again. Tell him what I have told you, tell him—if there is someone else, if you have already met someone you care for—tell him that too, so that he will know how impossible it must ever be that you will give him the love he hoped to win. Tell him that, be frank and truthful. Remember, it is for all your lives—all his life and all yours. When he realises that your heart can never be his, do you think he will not surfer more, will not his sufferings be longer drawn out than if you told him so frankly now? If the break was to come now, to come and be ended for ever—but to live together, to live a mock life, to live beneath the same roof, to share one another’s lives, and yet know one another’s souls to be miles and miles apart—oh, Joan, you would suffer, and he too, he perhaps even more than you.” “And you love him?” Joan said softly. “You love him, Ellice?” “With all my heart and soul. I would die for him. It—it sounds foolish, this sort of thing is foolish, the kind of words a silly girl would say, yet it is the truth.” “I think it is,” Joan said. “But then, dear, if he loves me, he could not love you?” “I think he might,” Ellice said softly. She was thinking of the morning, of the look she had seen in his eyes, the awakening look of a man who sees things he has been blind to. “I think he might,” her heart echoed. “I think he might, in time, in a little time.” And did not know, could not guess, that even at this moment Johnny Everard, sitting alone in his little study with untended papers strewn about him, was thinking of her—thinking of the look he had seen in her eyes that very day, out in the sunshine of the fields. “So you came to me to tell me. It was brave of you?” “I had to come. I could not have come if you had been different from what you are.” “Then, even though I am taking away the man you love from you, you do not hate me?” “Hate you? Sometimes I think I wished I could—but I could not. If I had hated you, if I had thought you cold and hard to all the world, I would not be here. I have come to plead to you because you are generous and honest, true and good. I could not have come otherwise.” “What must I do, little Ellice?” “Tell him the truth, if there is—” “There is—yet that could never come to anything.” “Why not?” “Because—ah, you can’t understand.” “Still, your heart is not your own; you could never give it to Johnny Everard.” “And I must tell him so, and then—” “And then you will ask him if he would be content to live all his life without love, knowing that he will never, never win your heart, because it would be impossible.” “But I have given him my promise, Ellice.” “I know, I know; and you will not break it, because you could not break a promise. But you will tell him this, and offer him his freedom; it will be for him to decide.”