have. It seems to me that our error was in letting her mother consent to
our engagement if she would not or could not consent to our marriage.
When it came to that we ought both to have had the strength to say that
then there should be no engagement. It was my place to do that. I could
have prevented the error which I can't undo."

"I don't see how it could have been easier to prevent than to undo your
error. I don't admit it's an error, but I call it so because you do.
After all, an engagement is nothing but an open confession between two
people that they are in love with each other and wish to marry. There
need be no sort of pledge or promise to make the engagement binding, if
there is love. It's the love that binds."

"Yes."

"It bound you from your first acknowledgment of it, and unless you could
deny your love now, or hereafter, it must always bind you. If you own
that you still love each other, you are still engaged, no matter how
much you release each other. Could you think of loving her and marrying
some one else? Could she love you and marry another? There isn't any
error, unless you've mistaken your feeling for each other. If you have,
I should decidedly say you couldn't break your engagement too soon. In
fact, there wouldn't be any real engagement to break."

"Of course you are right," said Glendenning, but not so strenuously as
he might.

I had a feeling that he had not put forward the main cause of his
unhappiness, though he had given a true cause; that he had made some
lesser sense of wrong stand for a greater, as people often do in