It was in the following June that Caragh found himself preparing for his final visit to Ballindra. Lettice Nevern and her brother had been in town for some six weeks during the winter, and his business affairs having straightened themselves, and enabled him to anticipate a sufficiently plausible income for two people, he had asked Arthur Nevern formally for his sister's hand.  
Nevern understood the proposal and the man who made it so slightly, that, displeased by the prospective loss of an admirable housekeeper, he began to pile up, breathlessly, inflated obstacles to its fulfilment.
 
Caragh heard him out.
 
"It's a confounded nuisance, of course, for you," he said; "these sort of things always are for somebody. That's why I've waited to get my side of it square before bothering you, so that you'd know for certain from the outset when your sister would be leaving you. We're not going to decide where to settle till we can look at places together, so that won't make for delay, but she refuses to be hurried over her kit, as it's to provide six months' food for some pet school of hers in Ballindra, so I've given her till July. The only question is, would you sooner the wedding was over there or here?"
 
Arthur Nevern stared at the younger man's directness, but he discovered speedily that he might stare as he pleased.
 
The little that Lettice had was in her own right, and Caragh had asked no more with her from the man before him.
 
Nevern was thus left with nothing to refuse but his consent, and that, apparently, was of no consequence to those who asked it.
 
He gave it at last as ungraciously as he could, and agreed later that the ceremony should be in London, in order to share its expense with an aunt of his who had offered her house.
 
He twitted Caragh with his impatience, and Caragh smiled.
 
His smile touched a point of humour unlikely to tickle a future brother-in-law, but he suggested that a man's hurry to be married seldom appealed to his friends.
 
He might have added that the reasons for it in his own case did not appeal to himself, but they were too serious and disconcerting even for his sense of the ridiculous.
 
They were, put briefly, the possible attraction of another woman; and it was his despairing self-contempt that goaded him to dispose, so high-handedly, of any obstacles to his marriage with Lettice Nevern.
 
It was particularly characteristic of him, that while reflecting almost every hour on some fantastic chance that might avert their union, he applied his foot with an almost unmannerly intolerance to any of the reasonable hindrances in its way. That was of a piece, no doubt, with his marked aversion from any form of moral hedging, and his preferred fondness for an honest lie.
 
He had stayed at Budapest for three days after his confession, to keep Ethel Vernon company till her husband's engagements were at an end. He had asked her if she wished him to remain, and she had said indifferently that he must please himself. He did not please himself; but he did not go.
 
The terms on which they met and spoke were strained and curious.
 
Caragh in his perverse fashion found them stimulating. Ethel made not the faintest reference to what he had told her, but she treated him neither with the familiar plainness into which they had fallen, nor as a common and secure acquaintance.
 
There was about her bearing an extraordinary delicacy and distance such as a girl uses to deny herself to the man to whom, unconscious, she has, proudly and irretrievably, given her heart.
 
Having exhausted the interests of the town, they spent the time in long drives to the places she expressed a wish to see in the country; an occupation not pre-eminently adapted to an evasive relationship.
 
On the fourth morning she said to him, simply:
 
"I can't stand it any more. You must go."
 
"Have I been a brute?" he asked.
 
"No," she said; "you've been extremely nice. Perhaps that's why. I don't know: I've tried not to know. Perhaps I may feel differently when I meet you again. I can't say. I daresay not. But I can't go on as we are. You don't mind my asking, do you? I don't think you wanted to stay. Why should you? I can make up something to Henry about your going: there's always the telegraph to account for things. And don't write, please, unless I ask you to. I'm going to try to forget you—if I can. What's the use of doing anything else? I've been a fool enough as it is."
 
There was in Caragh's eye the remembrance of days when it seemed as if that desired oblivion would be his to seek, days when his devotion had appeared to be quite obliterated from her memory by the surprising splendour of some one else.
 
That was, of course, the last thing of which he could remind her, but it was, too, the last he could forget.
 
He had accepted the real misery of those days without murmuring; at least he might use their ancient poison as an anodyne now. Not to excuse, nor to exalt himself, but to dilute, as it were, now that he had to drink it, the cup of her indignation.
 
It made the sour of that seem, at least, not quite so much of his own mixing to remember that, twice at least in the last two years, he might have drifted from her on occasions when her attention was too engrossed by another to notice that he was gone.............