“Good God!” broke from him.  “With such excessive consideration for two other men, haven’t you an atom for the man you are to marry?  Hasn’t it occurred to you that in a matter seriously involving my life as well as yours, I have a claim, a joint authority with yourself?”

“Occurred to me?  It has never been out of my mind.”

“Yet you resent it, it seems.  I say that I forbid your doing something so full of painful consequences to us both, and you show that you resent it ...  Don’t you?”

“It’s a surprise to me that you would want to use your authority in such a way.  But—­”

“Then you must have failed to grasp that this act of folly you contemplate, over my entreaty and command, would bring an entirely new element into the situation ...”

Carlisle looked at him without shrinking now.  “A new element into the situation?  I don’t understand.  How do you mean?”

“Carlisle!  Be frank!  You know the effects of all this.  Have you the right, when I have sought one girl for my wife, to offer me quite another?”

Pink deepened on the girl’s cheek.

“I don’t think I have....  Well, Hugo, you are free....”

“Don’t say that!" cried Canning, in a voice thick with a chaos of feeling.  “It’s unendurable ...”

He turned abruptly away.

Of the two, in that disruptive moment, Canning was far the more visibly perturbed.  If women think with their emotions, Carlisle’s emotions, rebelling at long overstrain, had now run away with her.  She was never a docile girl, as her mother well knew.  To Canning she had dealt the ultimate unbelievable buffet.  Through all her incredible obstinacy, through all his knowledge of the capabilities of her spirit, he had hardly doubted that one hint of betrothal restiveness would be sufficient to bring her to her knees.  Now he seemed to wear her words like a frontlet, branded in the mantling scarlet of his brow.  The young man felt himself falling through space....

The same familiar little room, but now with a new face.  Twilight began to steal into it.  On the cheerless hearthside, the lovers stood, and each knew that words once spoken live forever.  And looking at each other’s faces each knew, and could not change it, that the lover was not uppermost in them now.  They were two human beings spent with long arguing, two wills hopelessly at the clash.

In the sudden break-up of the trusted and reliable, Canning’s polished style had been torn from him.  He owned, laboriously and at some length, that this serious disagreement between them was terribly disturbing to him.  How would it be later, if she refused now to show any regard for his urgent requests?  Was it unreasonable for him to expect his chosen wife to consider the responsibilities entailed by his name and position, to share his ambition to hold both above the stings of malice and unmerited scandal?

At another moment, both the manner and matter of Hugo’s remarks would have touched Carlisle profoundly.  But she was beyond thinking of Hugo now.  All that her fluttering heart could feel was that when he had promised to stand by her through all time, he had meant only to stand by her as long as she did everything as he told her....