and your father are about. But there is nothing save my own
conscience and my mother's love I would not part with to be able to
believe you honourably right in your own eyes--not in mine--God
forbid! That can never be--not until fair is foul and foul is fair.'

So saying, she held out her hand.

'God be between thee and me, Dorothy!' said Richard, with solemnity,
as he took it in his.

He spoke with a voice that seemed to him far away and not his own.
Until now he had never realized the idea of a final separation
between him and Dorothy; and even now, he could hardly believe she
was in earnest, but felt, rather, like a child whose nurse threatens
to forsake him on the dark road, and who begins to weep only from
the pitiful imagination of the thing, and not any actual fear of her
carrying the threat into execution. The idea of retaining her love
by ceasing to act on his convictions--the very possibility of
it--had never crossed the horizon of his thoughts. Had it come to
him as the merest intellectual notion, he would have perceived at
once, of such a loyal stock did he come, and so loyal had he himself
been to truth all his days, that to act upon her convictions instead
of his own would have been to widen a gulf at least measurable, to
one infinite and impassable.

She withdrew the hand which had solemnly pressed his, and left the
room. For a moment he stood gazing after her. Even in that moment,
the vague fear that she would not come again grew to a plain
conviction, and forcibly repressing the misery that rose in bodily
presence from his heart to his throat, he left the house, hurried