He took her hands, kissed them both, and released her. She stood for a while with downcast eyes and heaving bosom, recovering her mental balance. “You have not yet told me,” she said presently, in a calmer voice, “why there should be this upheaval. I have said perhaps I might help you. Why do your life and honour and my happiness depend upon your leaving England to-night, Roderick?” The supreme moment had come. He braced every nerve to meet the inevitable question. Summoning up an extraordinary dignity subtly tinged with sadness, he said with grave deliberation,-- “I cannot tell you.” Ella recoiled involuntarily, staggered by the unexpectedness of the reply. She could only regard him in mute but anxious questioning. “You must trust me, child,” he said. “It is another's secret.” “So grave as to be withheld even from me?” “Even so,” he replied. “I know,” he continued gravely, “I am asking you the ultimate thing a man can ask a woman,--blind trust. It is a thing that only the great soul, like you, can give. Put your hand in mine and trust in me!” “Let me think,” she said in a low voice. She sat down on a couch, baffled. If she looked up, she met the man's burning eyes fixed upon her, and the depths of her being were stirred. If she looked away, her life seemed fragmentary chaos, unrealisable, incomprehensible. She breathed fast from a heaving bosom. Roderick's mystery hovered between the grotesque and the tragic. To run away clandestinely with the man to whom she was to have been married with all the pomp of publicity on the morrow was an idea of comic opera. On the other hand, the blind trust required raised the proceeding to the heroic plane. Again, Nature within her shrank from mystery; she was a child appalled by the dark, and fear was upon her. But the sensitive gentlewoman felt the appeal to honour in every fibre of her pride. Generosity swelled against doubt. A strange physical coldness enwrapped her. To start to-night, with Roderick, surrendering herself utterly; the maiden in her piteously sought refuge from the thought. She glanced tremulously up at him, and her face flamed pink, and warmth entered her heart. She covered her cheeks with her hands and shrank into the corner of the couch. “Oh, could I not join you afterwards?” she moaned. He fell at her feet and clasped her knees, broke into impassioned pleading. It was a matter of life or death. His unbalanced artistic temperament burst all restraints of conventional forms of speech. He raved of his consuming need. He was less a man than a shaking passion.