Then his thoughts went back to the other Lizzie, about whom he had never felt these doubts. He had loved her, and had told her so. And she had told him her half of the story in very simple words--and most simply, and without at all "leaving things to be understood" they had planned the future that never was to be. He remembered the day when sitting over the drawing-room fire, and holding her dear hand he had said: "This is how we shall sit when we are old and gray, dearest." It had seemed so impossibly far-off then. And she had said: "I hope we shall die the same day, Cec." But this had not happened. And he had said: "And we shall have such a beautiful life--doing good, and working for God, and bringing up our children in the right way. Oh, Lizzie, it's very wonderful to think of that happiness, isn't it?" And she had laid her head on his shoulder and whispered: "I hope we shall have a little girl, dear." And he had said: "I shall call her Elizabeth, after my dear wife." "She must have eyes like yours though." "She will be exactly like both of us," he had said, and they sat hand in hand, and talked innocently, like two children, of the little child that was never to be. He had wanted them to put on her tombstone, Lizzie daughter of ---- and affianced wife of Cecil Underwood, but her mother had said that _there_ there was no marrying or giving in marriage. In his heart the Reverend Cecil had sometimes dared to hope that that text had been misunderstood. To him his Lizzie had always been "as the angels of God in Heaven." Then came the long broken years, and then the little girl--Elizabeth, his step-child. The pent-up love of all his life spent itself on her: a love so fond, so tender, so sacred that it seemed only self-respecting to hide it a little from the world by a mask of coldness. And Betty had never seen anything but the mask. "I think, when I see her, I will tell her all about my Lizzie," he said. "I wonder if she knows what the house is like without her. But of course she doesn't, or she would have asked to come home, long ago. I wonder whether she misses me very much. Madame Gautier is kind, she says; but no stranger can make a home, as love can make it."