inclination to cry. It ought to have been theatrical, but it wasn't--not
even when she took off her engagement ring, as she had read in novels
that girls did at the decisive instant, and laid it down on the table.
When she remembered this afterwards, it appeared rather foolish, but
Arthur seemed not to notice it, and when Marthy came in to light the
fire in the morning, she found the ring lying on a copy of Gray's Elegy
and brought it back to Gabriella.

"I'll never give you up," said Arthur stubbornly, and knowing his
character, she felt that he had spoken the truth. He could not give her
up even had he wished it, for, like a belief, she had passed from his
brain into the fibre of his being. She had become a habit to him, and
not love, but the inability to change, to cease thinking what he had
always thought, to break a fixed manner of life, would keep him faithful
to her in his heart.

"I'm sorry--oh, I'm sorry," she murmured, longing to have it over and to
return to Jane and the children. It occurred to her almost resentfully
that love was not always an unmixed delight.

"Is there any one else, Gabriella?" he asked with a sudden choking sound
in his voice. "I have sometimes thought--in the last four or five
months--that there might be--that you had changed--that--" He stopped
abruptly, and she answered him with a beautiful frankness which would
have horrified the imperishable, if desiccated, coquetry of her mother.

"There is some one else and there isn't," she replied simply. "I mean I
think of some one else very often--of some one who isn't in my life at
all--from whom I never hear--"