How can she leave it?
Impossible.
What claim can she put against these supreme claims of her promise, her mother's and sisters' need?
_His_ claim?
Oh, no--no! She admits with soreness and humiliation unspeakable that she has done him wrong.

If he loves her she has opened the way thereto; she confesses in her scrupulous honesty that when the inevitable withdrawal comes she will have given him cause to think of her hardly, slightingly.

She flinches painfully under the thought.

But it does not alter the matter.

This girl, brought up in the austerest school of Christian self-government, knows nothing of the divine rights of passion.