"My dear Myra," said Mrs. Dalmain, "I don't waste sympathy on false sentiment. And if Deryck had known you were already engaged to another man, instead of devoting to you four hours of his valuable time, he could have sent a sixpenny wire: 'Telegram a forgery. Accept heartfelt congratulations!'" "Jane, you are brutal. And seeing that I have just told you the whole story of these last weeks, with the cruel heart-breaking finale of yesterday, I fail to understand how you can speak of me as engaged to another man." Instantly Jane Dalmain's whole bearing altered. She ceased looking quizzically amused, and left off swinging her brown boot. She sat up, uncrossed her knees, and leaning her elbows upon them, held out her large capable hands to Lady Ingleby. Her noble face, grandly strong and tender, in its undeniable plainness, was full of womanly understanding and sympathy. "Ah, my dear," she said, "now we must come to the crux of the whole matter. I have merely been playing around the fringe of the subject, in order to give you time to recover from the inevitable strain of the long and painful recital you have felt it necessary to make, in order that I might fully understand your position in all its bearings. The real question is this: Are you going to forgive Jim Airth?" "I must never forgive him," said Lady Ingleby, with finality, "because, if I forgave him, I could not let him go." "Why let him go, when his going leaves your whole life desolate?" "Because," said Myra, "I feel I could not trust him; and I dare not marry a man whom I love as I love Jim Airth, unless I can trust him as implicitly as I trust my God. If I loved him less, I would take the risk. But I feel, for him, something which I can neither understand nor define; only I know that in time it would make him so completely master of me that, unless I could trust him absolutely--I should be afraid." "Is a man never to be trusted again," asked Jane, "because, under sudden fierce temptation, he has failed you once?" "It is not the failing once," said Myra. "It is the light thrown upon the whole quality of his love--of that _kind_ of love. The passion of it makes it selfish--selfish to the degree of being utterly regardless of right and wrong, and careless of the welfare of its unfortunate object. My fair name would have been smirched; my honour dragged in the mire; my present, blighted; my future, ruined; but what did _he_ care? It was all swept aside in the one sentence: 'You are mine, not his. You must come away with me.' I cannot trust myself to a love which has no standard of right and wrong. We look at it from different points of view. _You_ see only the man and his temptation. _I_ knew the priceless treasure of the love; therefore the sin against that love seems to me unforgivable." Mrs. Dalmain looked earnestly at her friend. Her steadfast eyes were deeply troubled.