the more I fought against it and tried to be true to my engagement, the
more I found myself being false. It's all very strange," she concluded,
"but that is just how it happened."

"And he knows nothing about it?"

"Oh, no. I told him I was engaged to you, and then he went away."

For an instant he was silent, and watching his face, so carefully
guarded and controlled by habit that it had the curious blank look of a
statue's, Gabriella could form no idea of the suppressed inarticulate
suffering in his heart.

"And if he came back would you marry him?" he asked.

Before replying she sat for a minute gazing down on her folded hands and
weighing each separate word of her answer.

"I should try not to, Arthur," she said at last, "but--but I am not sure
that I should be able to help it."

When at last he had said "good-bye" rather grimly, and gone out of the
door without looking back, she was conscious of an immense relief, of a
feeling that she could breathe freely again after an age of oppression.
There was a curious sense of unreality about the hour she had just
passed through, as if it belonged not to actual life, but to a play she
had been rehearsing. She had felt nothing. The breaking of her
engagement had failed utterly to move her.

After bolting the front door, she turned out the gas in the parlour,