She loved! It had come to her at last; this thing that she had scorned and disbelieved in, and yet that, possibly, she had secretly longed for. She had deemed herself too cold, too wise, too much set upon the good things of earth, to be touched by that scorching fire; but now she was no colder than any other love-sick maiden, no wiser than every other foolish woman who had been ready to wreck her life for love in the world's history. Surely no girl ever learnt the secret of her own heart with such dire dismay as did Vera Nevill. There was neither joy nor gladness within her, only a great anger against herself and her fate, and even against him who, as he had said, had dared to love her. She had courted the avowal from his lips, and yet she resented the words she had wrung from him. But, more than all, she resented the treachery of the heart that was within her. "Why did I ever see him?" she cried aloud in her bitterness, striking her hands wildly against each other. "What evil fate brought us together? What fool's madness induced me to go near him to-day? I was happy enough; I had all I wanted; I was content with my fate--and now--now!" Her passionate words died away into a wail. In her haste and her abstraction her foot caught against a long, withered bramble trail that lay across her path; she half stumbled. It was sufficient to arrest her steps. She stood still, and leant against the smooth, whitened trunk of a beech tree. Her hands locked themselves tightly together; her face, white and miserable, lifted itself despairingly towards the pitiless winter sky above her. "How am I to live out my life?" she asked herself, in her anguish. It had not entered into her head that she could alter it. It did not occur to her to imagine that she could give up anything to which she now stood pledged. To be John Kynaston's wife, and to love his brother, that was what struck upon her with horror; no other possible contingency had as yet suggested itself to her. Presently, as she moved slowly onwards, still absorbed in her new-found misfortune, a fresh train of thought came into her mind. She thought no longer about herself, but about him. "How cruel I was to leave him like that," she said to herself, reproachfully; "without a word, or so much as a look, of consolation--for, if I suffer, has not he suffered too!" She forgot that he had asked her for nothing; she only knew that, little enough as she had to give him, she had withheld that little from him. "What must he think of me?" she repeated to herself, in dismay. "How heartless and how cold I must be in his eyes to have parted from him thus without one single kind word. I might, at least, have told him that I was grateful for the love I cannot take. I wonder," she continued, half aloud to herself, "I wonder what it is like to be loved by Maurice----" She paused again, this time leaning against the wicket-gate that led out of the park into the high road.