“Not the least doubt about it. Next winter, if all goes well, I think I shall take Caryl with me if I go away.” “You are longing to see him. Will you go in without preparing him? or shall I tell him first?” “Well, first I should like a little talk with you. Can you spare me five minutes?” “Oh, yes.” She turned, and they walked in silence along the winding path, bordered on one side by a well kept hedge which was as yet only faintly green. He looked better and happier too, Rhoda thought, than he had done in the old days at the Mill-house. Certainly he had then led such a life of anxiety on account of his wife’s caprices and Jack Rotherfield’s escapades that domestic tranquillity was out of the question. As the silence continued, Rhoda presently stole a glance at Sir Robert, and found that he was looking at her intently. “You have been very unfairly treated,” he said abruptly. The blood rushed into her face. “I have been very happy--with Caryl,” she answered in a whisper. “Yes. But while you were at the Mill-house you had to suffer a great deal, both from my wife and from me. Between the two of us the situation, for a girl, must have been almost unendurable. But for your feeling for Caryl you could not have borne it.” “That’s all over now,” she said in a stifled voice. “I can remember only the best part of it, your kindness, and Lady Sarah’s brilliant charm.” A shadow passed over his face. “Yes,” he said solemnly. “That’s what I like to recollect. The best, the brightest side.” He paused and then said abruptly: “I’m afraid I was rather brutal to you on that last night, the terrible night.” Rhoda drew a long breath. “Brutal! Oh, no. You couldn’t be that. You were cold, you even seemed hard, but it was because you were not yourself, you were--overwhelmed.” He listened in silence, and there was a pause. They still walked along the winding path, where there was just room for two, side by side. “It wasn’t exactly that,” he said. “I have a confession to make, a terrible confession.” Rhoda’s cheeks blanched. What was he going to say? “You were wounded, I suppose, that I went away without saying good-bye to you, when you had been so good to my boy, so patient with my wife, so conscientious for me?” “Oh, pray don’t think about it. Of course, at such a time, after such a tragedy----” He cut her short. “Tragedy! Yes, it was a tragedy. Can you guess, I wonder, what a tragedy it was to me?” “I think I can. Worshipping this lovely woman, in all her beauty and charm, the effect upon you must have been stupendous, unimaginable.” Sir Robert turned upon her suddenly, with a fire she had never before seen shining in his eyes. “That was not the worst part of it,” he said in a sonorous voice. “What I was suffering from when that awful sight was suddenly presented to my eyes was--self-reproach. Self-reproach so terrible, so keen, that I could have cut off my right hand, drowned myself, shot myself, in the depths of my own self-abasement.”