her, and saw that she was looking at it while her head lay on my breast.
“I can never claim my release from my engagement,” she went on. “Whatever way it ends it must end wretchedly for me. All I can do, Marian, is not to add the remembrance that I have broken my promise and forgotten my father’s dying words, to make that wretchedness worse.”
“What is it you propose, then?” I asked.
“To tell Sir Percival Glyde the truth with my own lips,” she answered, “and to let him release me, if he will,
may be liable, and by which she may suffer lifelong sorrow and shame.”
“What is it?” she asked eagerly.
“The misfortune of believing too innocently in her own virtue, and in the faith and honour of the man she loves,” I answered.
She looked up at me with the artless bewilderment of a child. Not