"Why should I have told you? Only my uncle knows. It was a secret," she answered, in a clearer and colder tone. "I am sorry you did not know."

"So am I. God knows that I am sorry," said the young man, turning away to hide the look of bitter despair and disappointment, which he could not help but feel was too visibly imprinted on his face. "For if I had known, I might never have dared to love you. If I had known, I should never have dreamt of you as my wife."

At the sound of these two words, a shiver ran through her frame, as if a cold wind had blown over her from the mountain-heights above. She did not speak, however, and Brian went on in the low, difficult voice which told the intensity of his feelings more clearly than his words.

"I have been blind--mad, perhaps--but I thought that there was a hope for me. I fancied that you cared for me a little, that you guessed what I felt--that you, perhaps, felt it also. Oh, you need not tell me that I have been presumptuous. I see it now. But it was my one hope in life--I had nothing left; and I loved you."

His voice sank; he still stood with his face averted; a bitter silence fell upon him. For the moment he thought of the many losses and sorrows that he had experienced, and it seemed to him that this was the bitterest one of all. Elizabeth sat like a statue; her face was pale, her under-lip bitten, her hands tightly clasped together. At the end of some minutes' silence she roused herself to speak. There was an accent of hurt pride in her voice, but there was a tremor, too.

"I gave you no reason to think so, Mr. Stretton," she said.

"No," he answered, still without turning round. "I see now; I made a mistake."

"That you should ever have made the mistake," said Elizabeth, slowly, "seems to me----"

She did not finish the sentence. She spoke so slowly that Brian found it easy to interrupt her. He turned and broke impetuously into the middle of her phrase.

"It seems an insult--I understand. But I do not mean it as an insult. I mean it only as a tribute to your exquisite goodness, your sweetness, which would not let me pass upon my way without a word of kindly greeting--and yet what can I say, for I did not misunderstand that kindliness. I was not such a fool as to do that! No, I never really hoped; I never thought that you could for a moment look at me; believe me when I say that, even in my wildest dreams, I knew myself to be far, infinitely far, below you, utterly unworthy of your love, Elizabeth."

"No, no," she murmured, "you must not say that."

"But I do say it, and I mean it. I only ask to be forgiven for that wild dream--it lasted but for a moment, and there was nothing in it that could have offended even you, I think; nothing but the love itself. And I believe in a man's right to love the woman who is the best, the most beautiful, the noblest on earth for him, even if she were the Queen herself! If you think that I hoped where I ought to have despaired, forgive me; but don't say you forgive me for merely loving you; I had the right, to do that."

She altered her attitude as he spoke. Her hands were now before her face, and he saw that the tears were trickling between her fingers. All the generosity of the man's nature was stirred at the sight.

"I am very sorry that I have distressed you," he said. "I am sorry that I spoke so roughly--so hastily--at first. Trust me when I say that I will not offend in the same way again."

She lifted her face a little, and tried to wipe away her tears. "I am not offended, Mr. Stretton," she said. "You mistake me--I am only sorry--deeply sorry--that I--if I--have misled you in any way."

"Oh, you did not mislead me, Miss Murray," replied Brian, gently; "it was my own folly that was to blame. But since I have spoken, may I say something more? I should like, if possible, to justify myself a little in your eyes."

She bowed her head. "Will you not sit down?" she said, softly. "Say what you like; or, at least, what you think best."

He did not sit down exactly, but he came back to the stone on which he had been sitting at her feet, and dropped on one knee upon it.

"Let me speak to you in this way, as a culprit should speak," he said, with a faint smile which had in it a gleam of some slightly ironical feeling, "and then you can pardon or condemn me as you choose."

"If you feel like a culprit you condemn yourself," said Elizabeth, lifting her eyes to his.

"I do not feel like a culprit, Miss Murray. I have, as I said before, a perfect right to love you if I choose----" Elizabeth's eyes fell, and the colour stole into her cheeks--"I would maintain that right against all the world. But I want you to be merciful: I want you to listen for a little while----"

"Not to anything that I ought not to hear, Mr. Stretton."

"No: to nothing that would wrong Mr. Percival Heron even by a thought.

Only--it is a selfish wish of mine; but I have been misjudged a good deal in my life, and I do not want you to misjudge me--I should like you to understand how it was that I dared--yes, I dared--to love you. May I speak?"

"I don't know whether I ought to listen. I think I ought to go," said Elizabeth, with an irrepressible little sob. "No, do not speak--I cannot bear it."

"But in justice to me you ought to listen," said Brian, gently, and yet firmly. He laid one hand upon hers, and prevented her from rising. "A few words only," he said, in pleading tones. "Forgive me if I say I must go on. Forgive me if I say you must listen. It is for the last--and the only--time."

With a great sigh she sank back upon the stone seat from which she had tried to rise. Brian still held her hand. She did not draw it away. The lines of her face were all soft and relaxed; her usual clearness of purpose had deserted her. She did not know what to do.

"If you had loved me, Elizabeth--let me call you Elizabeth just for once; I will not ask to do it again--or if you had even been free--I would have told you my whole history from beginning to end, and let you judge how far I was justified in taking another name and living the life I do. But I won't lay that burden upon you now. It would not be fair. I think that you would have agreed with me--but it is not worth while to tell you now."

"I am sure that you would not have acted as you did without a good and honourable motive," said Elizabeth, trembling, though she did not know why.

"I acted more on impulse than on principle, I am afraid,", he answered.

"I was in great trouble, and it seemed easier--but I saw no reason afterwards to change my decision. Elizabeth, my friends think me dead, and I want them to think so still. I had been accused of a crime which I did not commit--not publicly accused, but accused in my own home by one--one who ought to have known me better; and I had inadvertently--by pure accident, remember--brought great misery and sorrow upon my house.

In all this--I could swear it to you, Elizabeth--I was not to blame. Can you believe my word?"

"I can, I do."

"God bless you for saying so, my love--the one love of my life--Elizabeth! Forgive me: I will not say it again. To add to my troubles, then, I found reason to believe that I had no right to the name I bore, that I was of a different family, a different race, altogether; that it would simplify the disposal of certain property if I were dead; and so--I died. I disappeared. I can never again take the name that once was mine."

He said all this, but no suspicion of the truth crossed Elizabeth's mind. That she was the person who had benefited by his disappearance was as far from her thoughts as from Brian's at that moment. That he was the Brian Luttrell of whom she had so often heard, whose death in the Alps had seemed so certain that even the law courts had been satisfied that she might rightfully inherit his possessions, that he--John Stretton, the boys' tutor--could be this dead cousin of her's, was too incredible a thought ever to occur to her. She felt nothing but sorrow for his past troubles, and a conviction that he was perfectly in the right.

"But you are deceiving your friends," she said.

"For their good, as I firmly believe," answered Brian, sorrowfully. "If I went back to them, I should cause a great deal of confusion and distress: I should make my so-called heirs uncomfortable and unhappy, and, as far as I can see, I should have no right to the property that they would not consent to retain if I were living."

"Yes--if I am dead, and if no one else appears to claim it. It is a complicated business, and one that would take some time to explain. Let it suffice that I was utterly hopeless, utterly miserable, when I cast away what had always seemed to me to be my birthright; that I was then for many months very ill; and that, when you met me in Italy, I was just winning my way back to health, and repose of mind and body. And then--do you remember how you looked and spoke to me? Of course, you do not know.

You were good, and sweet, and kind: you stretched out your hand to aid a fallen man, for I was poorer and more friendless than you knew; and from the moment when you said you trusted me, as we sat together on the bench upon the cliffs my whole soul went out to you, Elizabeth, and I loved you as I never had loved before--as I never shall love again."

"In time," she murmured, "you will learn to care for someone else, in time you will forget me."

"Forget you! I can never forget you, Elizabeth. Your trust in me--an unknown, friendless man, your goodness to me, your sweet pity for me, will never be forgotten. Can you wonder if I loved you, and if I thought that my love must surely have betrayed itself? I fancied that you guessed it----"

"No, no," she said, hurriedly. "I did not guess. I did not think. I only knew that you were a kind friend to me, and taught me and helped me in many ways. I have been often very lonely--I never had a friend."

"Is Percival Heron, then, no friend to you?" he asked, with something of indignant sternness in his voice.

"Ah, yes, he is a friend; but not--not--I cannot tell you what he is----"

"But you love him?" cried Brian, the sternness changing to anguish, as the doubt first presented itself to him. "Elizabeth, do not tell me that you have promised yourself to a man that you do not love! I may be miserable; but do not let me think that you will be miserable, too."

He caught both her hands in his and looked her steadily in the face. "I have heard them say that you never told a lie in all your life," he went on. "Speak the truth still, Elizabeth, and tell me whether you love Percival Heron as a woman should love a man! Tell me the truth."

She shrank a little at first, and tried to take her hands away. But when she found that Brian's clasp was firm, she drew herself up and looked him in the face with eyes that were full of an unutterable sadness, but also of a resolution which nothing on earth could shake.

"You have no right to ask me the question," she said; "and I have no right to give you any answer."

But something in her troubled face told him what that answer would have been.

CHAPTER XXIV.