she freely offered it.  There Hugh and his wife might abide in solitude until the sacred Twelfth, when religious observance would call thither a small company of select pilgrims.  The offer was gratefully accepted.  Major Carnaby saw no reason for hesitating, and agreed with Sibyl that the plan should be withheld from Hugh until the last moment, as a gratifying surprise.  By some means, however, on the day before Hugh’s release, there appeared in certain newspapers a little paragraph making known to the public this proof of Lady Isabel’s friendship for Sibyl and her husband.

‘It’s just as well,’ said Mrs. Carnaby, after appearing vexed for a moment.  ’People will be saved the trouble of calling here.  But it really is mysterious how the papers get hold of things.’

She was not quite sure that Hugh would approve her arrangement, and the event justified this misgiving.  Major Carnaby was to bring his brother to Oxford and Cambridge Mansions, and, if possible, all were to travel northward that same day.  But Hugh, on hearing what was proposed, made strong objection:  he refused to accept the hospitality of people quite unknown to him; why, with abundant resources of their own, should they become indebted to strangers?  So vehement was his resistance, and so pitiful the state of body and mind which showed itself in his all but hysterical excitement, that Sibyl pretended to abandon the scheme.  Today they would remain here, talking quietly; by tomorrow they might have decided what to do.

At ten o’clock next morning, when Sibyl had been up for an hour, Hugh still lay asleep.  She went softly into the room, lighted by the sun’s yellow glimmer through blind and lace curtains, and stood looking at him, her husband.  To him she had given all the love of which she was capable; she had admired him for his strength and his spirit, had liked him as a companion, had prized the flattery of his ardent devotion, his staunch fidelity.  To have married him was, of course, a mistake, not easy of explanation in her present mind; she regretted it, but with no bitterness, with no cruel or even unkind thought.  His haggard features, branded with the long rage of captivity; his great limbs, wasted to mere bone and muscle, moved her indignant pity.  Poor dear old boy!

He believed her; he still believed her.  She saw that these two years of misery had made his faith in her something like a religion; he found it his one refuge from despair.  ’But for that, Sibyl, I shouldn’t be alive now!’ She had known self-reproach; now again it touched her slightly, passingly —­ poor old boy!  But unfaithful to him?  To call that unfaithfulness?  The idea was too foolish.

Her fears were all outlived.  She had dared the worst, and daring was grown an easy habit.  But in the life that lay before them, her judgment, her ambitions, must prevail and direct.  Yesterday she had no course save yielding; today her rule must begin.