“Poor Tom, I wonder how he gets on without me!  Well, it won’t be for long.”

And she wished she could have let him know she was out here, that they might have had a chat for just ten minutes.

Unconsciously she walked toward their usual trysting place, a large overhanging plane-tree on the Keppel Street corner of the square.

Surely, surely, that could not be Tom!  Quite impossible, for he was not alone.  Two people, a young man and a young woman, stood at the tryst, absorbed in conversation:  evidently sweethearts, for he had one arm round her, and he kissed her unresisted several times.

Elizabeth gazed, fascinated, almost doubting the evidence of her own senses.  For the young men’s figure was so excessively like Tom’s.  At length, with the sort of feeling that makes one go steadily up to a shadow by the roadside, some ugly spectre that we feel sure, if we stare it out, will prove to be a mere imagination, she walked deliberately up to and past these “sweethearts.”

They did not see her; they were far too much occupied with one another; but she saw them, and saw at once that it was Tom, Tom’s own self, and with him her fellow-servant, Esther.

People may write volumes on jealousy, and volumes will still remain to be written.  It is next to remorse for guilt, the sharpest, sorest, most maddening torment that human nature can endure.

We may sit and gaze from the boxes at our Othellos and Biancas; we may laugh at the silly heart-burnings between Cousin Kate and Cousin Lucy in the ball-room, or the squabbles of Mary and Sally in the kitchen over the gardener’s lad; but there the thing remains.  A man can not make love to two women, a woman can not coquet with two men, without causing in degree that horrible agony, cruel as death, which is at the root of half the tragedies, and the cause of half the crimes of this world.

The complaint comes in different forms:  sometimes it is a case of slow poisoning or of ordeal by red-hot irons, which though not fatal, undermines the whole character, and burns ineffaceable scars into the soul.  And people take it in various ways—­some fiercely, stung by a sense of wounded self-love; others haughtily: 

“Pride’s a safe robe, I’ll wear it; but no rags.”

Others, again, humble, self-distrustful natures, whose only pride came through love, have nothing left them except rags.  In a moment all their thin robes of happiness are torn off; they stand shivering, naked and helpless before the blasts of the bitter world.

This was Elizabeth’s case.  After the first instant of stunned bewilderment and despair she took it all quite naturally, as if it were a thing which she ought all along to have known was sure to happen, and which was no more than she expected and deserved.

She passed the couple, still unobserved by them, and then walked round the other side of the square, deliberately home.