She was fond of him.

How fond, it would be more or less impossible to divine; but it must be nipped there--strangled utterly--if he were to fulfil her expectations of him.

What it was that pressed him to the sacrifice, he could not actually say; unless it were that it appealed to his better nature as a thing of shame to do otherwise.

She would marry him, he felt sure of that.

But marriage, with all its accompanying conventions and indissoluble bonds--indissoluble, except through the loathsome medium of the divorce court--was a condition of life that his whole nature shrank from.