“It's a new club, and no two members are acquainted. It is the most desolate place in London. A man comes here when he wants to work out his suicide. There's no one to distract his thoughts. Then he goes out and commits it.”
“Why did you join?” asked Ella, mechanically.
“Perhaps I foresaw this day. If your worshipped dearness had not waited for me at Urquhart's, I should have come here--and God knows what desperate remedies I should have brooded over. But I never foresaw having you here to strengthen me. Thank Heaven I did join, so as to have a haven of rest and quietude to bring you to.”
He passed his hand across his forehead wearily, and rested his elbow on the little table in front of him.
“My God!” he said. “It has been a bitter day for me.”
The waiter brought a tray with tea and delicately baked scones. Ella filled the cups and tried to cheer her companion, praising the tea and the arrangements of the club. The warmth, the little sense of novelty, working an unconscious influence, had brought back animation to her face. She looked very fresh and winsome in the man's eyes. They fixed themselves upon her despairingly. Ella suddenly broke off her trivial chatter.
“Ah you must not,” she said, with a little choke to keep down the tears. “There are so many great things left in the world to fight for--. Oh, I wish I could help you!”
“Bless you!” he replied solemnly--and how much was acting, and how much was genuine, the man's Maker alone could tell, for the man himself could not; “there is only one way in which you could help me, and that must not be. You are rich, I am poor. We are no longer working in the great common cause in which all such differences could have been sunk. As a man of honour I must release you from your engagement with me, for the conditions on which our engagement was based have lapsed. You are quite free, Ella, and I must go my way alone.”
He hid his face in his hands. Ella trifled with her tea-spoon.
“You are generous,” she said in a low voice. “But if your honour is at stake, so is mine. I could not turn away from you in your hour of need.”
“I am a defeated man,” he replied brokenly. “You would despise me.”
The word pierced her like a knife. At that moment she was noble, with the blind and piteous folly that is so often at the heart of woman's nobility. She drew herself up proudly, then stretched her arm impulsively across the table and closed her fresh young fingers on his hand.