"Did you never give any one cause to think you loved her?" "Not with intention." "But you might have without meaning to?" "I did, without meaning to." "Oh, you know?" she exclaimed. "Yes," he said, "I know. May I ask how you do?" "No," she replied; "I'd sooner not tell you that. I only wanted to be told it wasn't true." "But it is true!" he objected. "Oh, not what matters," she breathed. "Did she care for you very, very much?" "She cared a good deal more than I deserved," he said gravely; "and more unspeakably than I desired." "But she didn't find that out?" "No, she didn't find it out. Think what finding out would have meant to her." The girl was silent for a moment. "Did you kiss her?" she asked, below her breath. "I did many things I would have preferred not to," he said quietly; "but what they were you could not wish, I think, to learn from me." "On account of what I know?" she asked. "I don't know what you know," he replied; "but I think that no man who has shared, however unwillingly, a woman's secret, has any rights over it but those of burial." She gave him her lips with a smile, and made no further reference to the subject before they parted. She was going into the country, and he was not to see her for ten days. He spent some part of them wondering idly whence her information had come, but he was in no mood to make enquiry where it might have been effective, and had put the question from his mind, when, at the end of the week, he received from Lilias a feverish note saying that everything between them depended on his reply to something that she must ask him. Would he let her know the first moment he could come. He named the next morning, but, when leaving his rooms on the way to her the letter was delivered which changed the face of the world for him, and hung the future on his choice of an alternative. The letter was short, and passionately scornful. It admitted no challenge, no reply. She had seen, it said, all he had written to the other woman, and she despised him so utterly that she felt no pain in parting from him for ever. That was all. Yesterday he held for her all the beauty and the savour of the world, to-day she loathed him as a leper. In an hour she had repudiated the most sacred convictions of her soul. She had learnt his fineness at every turn of his thoughts. Her spirit, that had touched his at first so timidly, had come to seek with passionate security its most intimate caress. There was nothing she had not revealed to him, no shame so sweet nor so secret which she had feared to let him know. And now! "If I had loved a devil unawares," reflected Terence sadly, "I hardly think I would have cast her out like that. Love should not, for its own dignity, degrade so easily what it has ennobled." Yet not for a moment did he resent the ruthlessness of her letter. His love had indeed exalted her above possibility of that.