“No, I knew you could not,” he muttered; and was silent.

So was Hilary.  A vague trouble came over her.  Could it be that he, Robert Lyon, had been seized with the auri sacra fames, which he had so often inveighed against and despised? that his long battle with poverty had caused in him such an overweening desire for riches that, to obtain them, he would sacrifice every thing else, exile himself to a far country for years, selling his very life and soul for gold?

Such a thought of him was so terrible—­that is, would have been were it tenable—­that Hilary for an instant felt herself shiver all over.  The next she spoke out—­in justice to him she forced herself to speak out—­all her honest soul.

“I do believe that this going abroad to make a fortune, which young men so delight in, is often a most fatal mistake.  They give up far more than they gain—­country, home, health.  I think a man has no right to sell his life any more than his soul for so many thousands a year.”

Robert Lyon smiled—­“No, and I am not selling mine.  With my temperate habits I have as good a chance of health at Bombay as in London—­perhaps better.  And the years I must be absent I would have been absent almost as much from you—­I mean they would have been spent in work as engrossing and as hard.  They will soon pass, and then I shall come home rich—­rich.  Do you think I am growing mercenary?”

“No.”

“Tell me what you do think about me?”

“I—­can not quite understand.”

“And I cannot make you understand.  Perhaps I will, some day when I come back again.  Till then, you must trust me, Hilary.”

It happens occasionally, in moments of all but tolerable pain, that some small thing, a word, a look, a touch of a hand, lets in such a gleam of peace that nothing ever extinguishes the light of it:  it burns on for years and years, sometimes clear, sometimes obscured, but as ineffaceable from life and memory as a star from its place in the heavens.  Such, both then, and through the lonely years to come, were those five words, “You must trust me.  Hilary.”

She did; and in the perfection of that trust her own separate identity, with all its consciousness of pain, seemed annihilated; she did not think of herself at all, only of him, and with him, and for him.  So, for the time being, she lost all sense of personal suffering, and their walk that night was as cheerful and happy as if they were to walk together for weeks and months and years, in undivided confidence and content, instead of its being the last—­the very last.

Some one has said that all lovers have, soon or late, to learn to be only friends:  happiest and safest are those in whom the friendship is the foundation—­always firm and ready to fall back upon, long after the fascination of passion dies.  It may take a little from the romance of these two if I own that Robert Lyon talked to Hilary not a word about love, and a good deal about pure business, telling her all his affairs and arrangements, and giving her as clear an idea of his future life as it was possible to do within the limits of one brief half hour.