"Yes," he admitted, "and you've had it; though it hasn't been easy. Consider if a man is likely to relish the sort of confession that I've made to you?" "You couldn't very well avoid it," she reminded him. "Oh, yes, I could," he said. "I might have quarrelled with you--you're uncommonly easy to quarrel with--and then ... when you heard of my engagement you'd have put it down to pique." "You thought of doing that?" she asked distrustfully. "Yes, I thought of that and of a dozen other ways of--well, of taking you in," he admitted, "and of getting out of it myself." "It doesn't sound very brave," she said softly. "No, it sounds uncommon paltry, I've no doubt," he agreed. "I funked it, and I tried to think it would have been kinder as well as pleasanter to keep you in the dark. Would it?" She shook her head. "Well, I don't know," he reflected doubtfully; "I fancy you'd sooner have thought that you had done it than that I had, however little you might have liked it. And you'd have been a bit sorry for me, instead of thinking me a beast." "I'm sorry for you as it is," she answered quietly. "What do you mean?" he exclaimed. "I don't believe you love her," she said unsteadily. "Oh, well," he murmured with a shrug; "then I can't persuade you." She shook her head again--the little tossing shake which reminded Caragh sharply of how she used to tease him, through the curls that sometimes fall across her eyes. He was looking at the stars before she spoke again. "I think there's one thing you might tell me which wouldn't hurt her if I knew," she said persuadingly. "Was it because you'd come to care less for me that ... that you ... that you asked her?" He rose from his seat, and leant against the iron trellis of the balcony, looking out across the river. "Was it?" she pleaded. "No!" he said to the night. He turned presently and took a step to enter the room. "Time I went," he said, checking his progress as he passed her chair. She laid her fingers upon his sleeve. "Morrie!" she whispered. He stooped and kissed her face, while her detaining hand slipped with a soft pressure into his. Then she let it go, and sat, listening, as the sound of his footsteps died away beyond the room; sat gazing out at the moving sky, with a face from which the light had faded, till Henry Vernon's voice surprised her dreams. VII It was in the following June that Caragh found himself preparing for his final visit to Ballindra. Lettice Nevern and her brother had been in town for some six weeks during the winter, and his business affairs having straightened themselves, and enabled him to anticipate a sufficiently plausible income for two people, he had asked Arthur Nevern formally for his sister's hand. Nevern understood the proposal and the man who made it so slightly, that, displeased by the prospective loss of an admirable housekeeper, he began to pile up, breathlessly, inflated obstacles to its fulfilment. Caragh heard him out.