for doing what she had done? She shook her head very sadly.
“But you’re not a child—you’re not a woman of moods,” Rodney persisted. “You couldn’t have accepted me if you hadn’t loved me!” he cried.
A sense of her own misbehaviour, which she had succeeded in keeping from her by sharpening her consciousness of Rodney’s faults, now swept over her and almost overwhelmed her. What were his faults in comparison with the fact that he cared for her? What were her virtues in comparison with the fact that she did not care for him? In a flash the conviction that not to care is the uttermost sin of all stamped itself upon her inmost thought; and she felt herself branded for ever.
He had taken her arm, and held her hand firmly in his, nor had she the force to resist what now seemed to her his enormously superior strength. Very well; she would submit, as her mother and her aunt and most women, perhaps, had submitted; and yet she knew that every second of such submission to his strength was a second of treachery to him.
“I did say I would marry you, but it was wrong,” she forced herself to say, and she stiffened her arm as if to annul even the seeming submission of that separate part of her; “for I don’t love you, William; you’ve noticed it, every one’s noticed it; why should we go on pretending? When I told you I loved you, I was wrong. I said what I knew to be untrue.”
As none of her words seemed to her at all adequate to represent what she felt, she repeated them, and emphasized them without realizing the effect that they might have upon a man who cared for her. She was completely taken aback by finding her arm suddenly dropped; then she saw his face most strangely contorted; was he laughing, it flashed across her? In another moment she saw that he was in tears. In her bewilderment at this appari-
