'However, we are wasting words,' he resumed cheerfully. 'It is better
for us to part as we met, and continue to be the strangers that we have
become to each other. I owe you an apology for having been betrayed into
more feeling than I had a right to show, and let us part friends. Good
night, Mrs. Petherwin, and success to you. We may meet again, some day,
I hope.'

'Good night,' she said, extending her hand. He touched it, turned about,
and in a short time nothing remained of him but quick regular brushings
against the heather in the deep broad shadow of the moor.

Ethelberta slowly moved on in the direction that he had pointed out. This
meeting had surprised her in several ways. First, there was the
conjuncture itself; but more than that was the fact that he had not
parted from her with any of the tragic resentment that she had from time
to time imagined for that scene if it ever occurred. Yet there was
really nothing wonderful in this: it is part of the generous nature of a
bachelor to be not indisposed to forgive a portionless sweetheart who, by
marrying elsewhere, has deprived him of the bliss of being obliged to
marry her himself. Ethelberta would have been disappointed quite had
there not been a comforting development of exasperation in the middle
part of his talk; but after all it formed a poor substitute for the
loving hatred she had expected.

When she reached the hotel the lamp over the door showed a face a little
flushed, but the agitation which at first had possessed her was gone to a
mere nothing. In the hall she met a slender woman wearing a silk dress
of that peculiar black which in sunlight proclaims itself to have once
seen better days as a brown, and days even better than those as a
lavender, green, or blue.