There was another interpretation of the silence, which many would have considered the most probable of all—­he might be married.  Not deliberately, but suddenly; drawn into it by some of those impelling trains of circumstance which are the cause of so many marriages, especially with men; or, impelled by one of those violent passions which occasionally seize on an exceedingly good man, fascinating him against his conscience, reason, and will, until he wakes up to find himself fettered and ruined for life.  Such things do happen, strangely, pitifully often.  The like might have happened to Robert Lyon.

Hilary did not actually believe it, but still her common sense told her that it was possible.  She was not an inexperienced girl now; she looked on the world with the eyes of a woman of thirty; and though, thank Heaven! the romance had never gone out of her—­the faith, and trust, and tender love—­still it had sobered down a little.  She knew it was quite within the bounds of possibility that a young man, separated from her for seven years, thrown into all kinds of circumstances and among all sorts of people, should have changed very much in himself, and, consequently, toward her.  That, without absolute faithlessness, he might suddenly have seen some other woman he liked better, and have married at once.  Or, if he came back unmarried—­she had taught herself to look this probability also steadily in the face—­he might find the reality of her—­Hilary Leaf—­different from his remembrance of her; and so, without actual falseness to the old true love, might not love her any more.

These fears made her resolutely oppose Johanna’s wish to write to the house of business at Liverpool, and ask what had become of Mr. Lyon.  It seemed like seeking after him, trying to hold him by the slender chain which he had never attempted to make any stronger, and which, already, he might have broken, or desired to break.

She could not do it.  Something forbade her; that something in the inmost depths of a woman’s nature which makes her feel her own value, and exact that she shall be sought; that, if her love be worth having, it is worth seeking; that, however dear a man may be to her, she refuses to drop into his mouth like an overripe peach from a garden wall.  In her sharpest agony of anxiety concerning him, Hilary felt that she could not, on her part, take any step that seemed to compel love—­or even friendship—­from Robert Lyon.  It was not pride, she could hardly be called a proud woman; it was an innate sense of the dignity of that love which, as a free gift, is precious as “much fine gold.” yet becomes the merest dross, utterly and insulting poor—­when paid as a debt of honor, or offered as a benevolent largess.

And so, though oftentimes her heart felt breaking, Hilary labored on; sat the long day patiently at her desk; interested herself in the young people over whom she ruled; became Miss Balquidder’s right hand in all sorts of schemes which that good woman was forever carrying out for the benefit of her fellow-creatures; and at leisure times occupied herself with Johanna, or with Elizabeth and the baby, trying to think it was a very beautiful and happy world, with love still in it, and a God of love ruling over it—­only, only—­