'Now, and then, and always, Gustave.' The expression of her face had changed; there was no avoidance, no hesitation in her manner now. She looked at him, she spoke to him steadily, but she looked years older than she had done when Gustave de Tournefort entered the room. The sight of him had changed the dream-like impossibility which had been her prevailing sense during the whole of that day into an overwhelming and awful reality. And yet in that reality he had no share. Ever since the crash had come, May Forestfield's better nature had shaken off the thrall of the guilty infatuation under which she had been held by De Tournefort, and lured to her ruin; and there had succeeded to it a bewildering wonderment as to its former existence. For many days together May never once thought of her 'lover.' Her mind was ever busy with the past, but not with his brief, terrible, fatal share in it; busy with her old home, her dead mother, her dead baby, even her husband as he used to be, with every incident of the every-day life of her lost past; full of a fond regret, agonised, though dreamy, and with intervals of incredulousness concerning her own fate--as if this dreadful thing _could not be_. But she recognised with melancholy surprise that in these reveries De Tournefort's figure had no place; and sometimes she abhorred herself as the fact forced itself upon her recognition. She had sinned before God, and ruined herself for ever in this world, for a man whom she now never thought of in any sense of association with her present or her future. What part had he had in the musings from which his entrance had roused her? Was there a trace of him among the mementoes of the past which she had collected together in this supreme hour of her life? This truth, and the full significance of it, inspired her words, and lent to her voice the calm tone of conviction as she spoke to him, without the slightest hurry or emotion, he observing her the while with astonishment, and a growing conviction that some extraordinary change had passed over her. 'Now, and then, and always. I am not a wise woman even yet, but I am at least a wiser than when you and I first met; and I know what would come of putting my fate into your hands for the future.' 'Do you mean to say that I am not to be trusted with it? That I should treat you ill? That you no longer love me?'