He hates the notion of a public breach.

He wants to keep us both." When she reached this point, Rodney pocketed the letter and elaborately looked at his watch.

Although the action meant that he resigned Cassandra, for he knew his own incompetence and distrusted himself entirely, and lost Katharine, for whom his feeling was profound though unsatisfactory, still it appeared to him that there was nothing else left for him to do.

He was forced to go, leaving Katharine free, as he had said, to tell her mother that the engagement was at an end.

But to do what plain duty required of an honorable man, cost an effort which only a day or two ago would have been inconceivable to him.