She heard him catch his breath, and then they sat motionless for a long while, just as they had been sitting when she spoke. Now that she had wrenched the fact out, the poignancy of her suffering subsided; even by degrees she realised that, after this, her leaving the town was inevitable, and her thoughts began to concern themselves vaguely with her future. In him consciousness could never waver from the sound of what she had said. She was impure. She had known passion and shame—she herself! The landscape lost its proportion as he stared; the clouds of the sky and the hue of the distance, everything had altered—she was impure.

The laboured minutes passed; he turned and looked slowly down at her averted profile. The curve of cheek was colourless; her hands were still lying clasped on her knee. He watched her for a moment, striving to connect the woman with her words. Something seemed bearing on his brain, so that it did not feel quite near. It did not feel so alive, nor so much his own, as before the vileness of this thing was uttered.

"I have never told you a falsehood," she murmured, "I didn\'t tell you any falsehood in London. Don\'t think me all deceit—every word of what I said that day was true."

"I dare say," he answered dully; "I have not accused you."

The change in his tone was pregnant with condemnation to her, and she wondered if he was believing her; but, indeed, he hardly recognised that she had said anything requiring belief. Her assurance appeared juvenile to him, incongruous. There was an air almost of unreality about their being seated here as they were, gazing at the blur of churchyard. Something never to be undone had happened and she was strange.

The service had ended, and, trooping out, the Sunday-school pupils clattered past their feet, shiny and clamorous, and eyeing them with sidelong inquisition. She rose nervously, and, rousing himself, he went with her through the crowd of children as far as the gate. There their steps flagged to a standstill, and for a few seconds they remained looking down the lane in silence.

To her, stunned by no shock to make reality less real, these final seconds held the condensed humiliation of the hour. The rigidity with which the man waited beside her seemed eloquent of disgust, and she mused bitterly on what she had done, how she had abased herself and destroyed his respect; she longed to be free of his reproachful presence. On the gravel behind them one of the bigger girls whispered to another, and the other giggled.

She made a slight movement, and he responded with something impossible to catch. She did not offer her hand; she did not immediately pity him. Had a stranger told him this thing of her, she would have pitied and understood; told him by herself, she understood only that she was being despised. They separated with a mechanical "good-afternoon," quietly and slowly. The two girls, who watched them with precocious eagerness, debated their relationship.

The road lay before him long and bare, and lethargically he took it. He continued to hear her words, "There used to be another man," but he did not know he heard them—he did not actively pursue any train of thought. It was only in momentary intervals that he became aware that he was thinking. The sense of there being something numbed within him still endured, and as yet his condition was more of stupor than of pain.

"There used to be another man!" The sentence hummed in his ears, and as he went along he awoke to it, the persistence of it touched him; and he began to repeat it—mentally, difficultly, trying to spur his mind into comprehension of it and take it in. He did not suffer acutely even then. There was nothing acute in his feelings whatever. He found it hard to realise, albeit he did not doubt. She was what she had said she was; he knew it. But he could not see her so; he could not imagine her the woman that she had said she used to be. He saw her always as she had been to him, composed and self-contained. The demeanour had been a mask, yet it clung to his likeness of her, obscuring the true identity from him still. He strove to conceive her in her past life, contemning himself because he could not; he wanted to remember that he had been loving a disguise; he wanted to obliterate it. The fact of its having been a disguise and never she all the time was so hard to grasp. He tried to look upon her laughing in dishonour, but the picture would not live; it appeared unnatural. It was the inception of his agony: the feeling that he had known her so very little that it was her real self which seemed the impossible.

And that other man had known it all—seen every mood of her, learned her in every phase!

"Mary!" he muttered; and was lost in the consciousness that actually he had never known "Mary."

He perceived that the man was moving through his thoughts as a dark man, short and suave, and he wondered how the fancy had arisen. Vaguely he began to wonder what he had been like indeed. It was too soon to question who he was—he wondered only how he looked, in a dim mental searching for the presence to associate her with. Next, the impression vanished, and sudden recollections came to him of men he was accustomed to meet.

The manner and mien of these riveted his attention. It was not by his own will that he considered them; the personalities were insistent. He did not suppose that any one of them had been her lover; he knew that it was chimerical to view any one of them as such; but his brain had been groping for a man, and these familiar men obtruded themselves vividly. The lurking horror of her defilement materialised, so that the sweat burst out on him; the significance of what he had heard flared red upon his vision. To think that it had pleased her to lend herself for the toy of a man\'s leisure, that some man had been free to make her the boast of his conceit, twisted his heart-strings.

The solidity of the hospital confronted him on the slope that he had begun to mount. Beneath him stretched the herbage of cottage gardens somnolent in Sabbath calm. Out of the silence came the quick yapping of a shop-boy\'s dog, the shrillness of a shop-boy\'s whistle. They were the only sounds. Then he went in.

That evening Miss Brettan told Mrs. Kincaid that she wished to leave her.

The old lady received the announcement without any mark of surprise.

"You know your own mind best," she said meditatively; "but I\'m sorry you are going—very sorry."

"Yes," said Mary; "I must go. I\'m sorry too, but I can\'t help myself. I——"

"I used to think you\'d stop with me always; we got on so well together."

"You\'ve been more than kind to me from the very first day; I shall never forget how kind you have been! If it were only possible. But it isn\'t; I——"

Once more the pronoun as the stumbling-block on delicate ground.

"I can\'t stop!" she added thickly; "I hope you\'ll be luckier with your next companion."

"I shan\'t have another; changes upset me. And you must go when it suits you best, you know; don\'t stay on to give me time to make fresh arrangements, as I haven\'t any to make. Study your own convenience entirely."

"This week?"

"Yes, very well; let it be this week."

They said no more then. But the following afternoon, Mrs. Kincaid broached the subject abruptly.

"What are you going to do, Miss Brettan?" she inquired. "Have you anything else in view?"

"No," said Mary hesitatingly; "not yet."

The suppression of her motive made plain speaking difficult to both.

"I\'ve no doubt, though," she added, "that I shall be all right."

"What a pity it is! What a pity it is, to be sure!"

"Oh, you mustn\'t grieve about me!" she exclaimed; "it isn\'t worth that; I\'m not worth it. You know—you know, so many women in the world have to make a living; and they do make it, somehow. It\'s only one more."

"And so many women find they can\'t! Tell me, must you go? Are you quite sure you\'re not exaggerating the necessity? I don\'t ask you your reasons, I never meddle in people\'s private affairs. But are you sure you aren\'t looking on anything in a false light and going to extremes?"

"Oh!" responded Mary, carried into sudden candour, "do you suppose I don\'t shiver at the prospect? Do you suppose it attracts me? I\'m not a girl, I\'m not quixotic; I can\'t stop here!"

The elder woman sighed.

"Why couldn\'t you care for such a good fellow as my son?" she thought. "Then there would have been none of this bother for any of us!"

"I hope you\'ll be fortunate," she said gently. "Anything I can do to help you, of course, I will!"

"Thank you," said Mary.

"I mean, you mustn\'t scruple to refer to me; it\'s your only chance. Without any references——"

"Yes, I know too well how indispensable they are; but——"

"You have been here two years. I shall say I should have liked it to remain your home."

"Thank you," said Mary, again. But she was by no means certain that she could avail herself of this recommendation given in ignorance of the truth. It was precisely the matter that she had been debating. If she attempted to avail herself of it, the doctor might have something to say; and she was loath to be indebted for testimony from the mother which the son would know to be undeserved, whether he interfered, or not; she wanted her renunciation to be complete. Yet, without this source of aid——She trembled. How speedily the few pounds in her possession would vanish! how soon there would be a revival of her past experience, with all its heartlessness and squalor! In imagination she was already footsore, adrift in the London streets.

"Mrs. Kincaid——" she cried. A passionate impulse seized her to declare everything. If she had been seventeen, she would have knelt at the old woman\'s feet, for it is not so much the vehemence of our moods that diminishes with time as the power of restraint that increases.

"Mrs. Kincaid, you must know? You must guess why——"

"I know nothing," said the old woman, quickly; "I don\'t guess!" The colour sank from her face, and Mary had never heard her speak with so much energy. "My son shall tell me—I have a son—I will not hear from you!"

"I beg your pardon," said Mary; and they were silent.

The same evening Mrs. Kincaid sent a message to the hospital, asking her son to come round to see her.

She had not mentioned that she was going to do so, and it was with a little shock that Mary heard the order given. She supposed, however, that it was given in her presence by way of a hint, and when the time-approached for him to arrive, she withdrew.

He came with misgivings and with relief. The last twenty-four hours had inclined him to the state of tension in which the unexpected is always the portentous, but in which one waits, nevertheless, for something unlooked-for to occur. He did not know what he dreaded to hear, but the summons alarmed him, even while he welcomed it for permitting him to go to the house.

He threw a r............