In this case it was an absolutely necessity.  Robert Lyon’s position in “our firm,” with which he identified himself with the natural pride of a man who has diligently worked his way up to fortune, was such that he could not, without sacrificing his future prospects, and likewise what he felt to be a point of honor, refuse to go back to Bombay until such time as his senior partner’s son, the young fellow whom he had “coached” in Hindostanee, and nursed through a fever years ago, could conveniently take his place abroad.

“Of course,” he said, explaining this to Hilary and her sister, “accidental circumstances might occur to cause my return home before the three years were out, but the act must be none of mine; I must do my duty.”

“Yes, you must,” answered Hilary, with a gleam lighting up her eyes.  She loved so in him this one great principle of his life—­the back-bone of it, as it were—­duty before all things.

Johanna asked no questions.  Once she had inquired, with a tremulous, hardly concealed alarm, whether Robert wished to take Hilary back with him, and Hilary had kissed her, smilingly, saying, “No, that was impossible.”  Afterward the subject was never revived.

And so these two lovers, both stern in what they thought their duty, went on silently together to the last day of parting.

It was almost as quiet a day as that never-to-be-forgotten Sunday at Stowbury.  They went a long walk together, in the course of which Mr. Lyon forced her to agree to what hitherto she had steadfastly resisted, that she and Johanna should accept from him enough, in addition to their own fifty pounds a year, to enable them to live comfortably without her working any more.

“Are you ashamed of my working?” she asked, with something between a tear and a smile.  “Sometimes I used to be afraid you would think the less of me because circumstances made me an independent woman, earning my own bread.  Do you?”

“My darling, no.  I am proud of her.  But she must never work any more.  Johanna says right; it is a man’s place, and not a woman’s.  I will not allow it.”

When he spoke in that tone Hilary always submitted.

He told her another thing while arranging with her all the business part of their concerns, and to reconcile her to this partial dependence upon him, which, he urged, was only forestalling his rights; that before he first quitted England, seven years ago, he had made his will, leaving her, if still unmarried, his sole heir and legatee, indeed in exactly the position that she would have been had she been his wife.

“This will exists still; so that in any case you are safe.  No further poverty can ever befall my Hilary.”

His—­his own—­Robert Lyon’s own.  Her sense of this was so strong that it took away the sharpness of the parting, made her feel, up to the very last minute, when she clung to him—­was pressed close to him—­heart to heart and lip to lip—­for a space that seemed half a life-time of mixed anguish and joy—­that he was not really going; that somehow or other, next day or next week he would be back again, as in his frequent re-appearances, exactly as before.