She was looking away from him and did not know whether he had changed his position or not, for he did not answer. There was a strange heavy silence in which she could hear a watch ticking, the sigh of the wind among the fir-trees, a scream from the distant train, the throbbing of her heart. All her strength seemed to have gone out in those four words. "Yes," said Anthony, at last, hoarsely, "for Miss Lovell, especially." Something in his voice or in the mechanical repetition of her words brought back Winifred's courage. "For her sake and your mother's," she said, earnestly. "However insignificant an accusation may be, its falseness must be a grief to the friends who best know how very false it is. I hope you will not try to prevent our being glad, although I dare say the poor man's fate makes rejoicing seem heartless." "It makes me believe that failure is the end of our best hopes,--of all that is best in us," said Anthony, standing with his back to her and speaking in a tone of deep despondency. "Not failure, really," said Winifred, with a flush of lovely eager colour rising in her cheeks. "Surely it is not possible that what is best can fail. It may seem so even to ourselves, but it cannot be the thing itself, only our way of thinking of it. Don't you believe that failure and victory are sometimes one?" Anthony was silent. Was it so indeed? Sometimes one, triumph and defeat, death and life, the end and the beginning? Was it now--when he was ready to cry out that all was at its dreariest, with pangs of which he was tasting the most utter sharpness--now that he caught, through the clouds, a glimpse of something beyond change and beyond sorrow? He came and stood in front of Winifred, and put out his hand. "I can't tell," he said. "It may be so, and I think you are more lively to be right than I. At all events, one has to learn how to accept failure, and perhaps--some day--one will understand better. God bless you, Winifred." She sat where he left her; she heard doors open and shut, and, turning round, saw him presently go quickly down the little path, pass under the fir-trees, and disappear from sight. Her breath came and went rapidly, a light was in her eyes. With all her struggle, those minutes had not been so bitter to her as to him; there was a joy in knowing that he loved her, it seemed to lift a secret reproach off her heart; and though this knowledge might bring sharper sadness to her by and by, for the moment the relief was so great as to make all sadness seem endurable. CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR.