"Then why did you——?" She paused, so filled with all sorts of conflicting desires and emotions—longing to know, and yet passionately telling herself it didn't matter to her—that she had lost all certainty in herself, and her voice came sharp and tremulous.

"She simply threw me over," he said at last. "Found out she didn't like the idea of married life, though she was very fond of me. I suppose there are women like that in every civilized community. No doubt if she were a Roman Catholic she would be a nun, and she would be a good one. She's good all through. I realize that, in spite of what has happened."

Caroline looked at him as he faced the sea in the strong light—at his heavy features, his broadly set figure, his whole air of knowledge and virility and strength. Then the words fluttered up into her throat without any volition of her own: "Oh, you well may think her good! You well may!"

For in that moment she guessed what Laura had come to tell her but had not been able to say after all. That heavenly kindness of Laura's was actually deep enough and real enough to make her spare her lover the knowledge of how he had wounded her. It was clear enough that she—who always seemed so easy and simple—had detected the first little change in him when he became attracted to Caroline. So she had put off her wedding to make sure, and she had become sure.

Caroline opened her lips to say with passion: "Can't you see what she did it for?" But before the words left her lips, there came into her mind a memory of Laura's face as it looked when she left the door of the Cottage, which was so vivid as to be almost an illusion. Now she knew what the anxious, uncertain gaze of those brown eyes into her own had really meant.

Laura had been trying to say all the time: "Don't tell him! don't tell him!" But the complexities involved had been too great, when it came to the point, for anything to be actually said.

Caroline waited to get back her self-command, stirred by a sudden loyalty to her own sex which made her long to pierce his masculine obtuseness—to show him what Laura had sacrificed and what he had missed. And as he watched her, he wondered once more at the quality of aloofness—of something fresh and cool despite her passion—which had caused him to think of a nymph on fire when he first held her in his arms.

"Well?" he said at last. "It's all right now, isn't it?"

She shook her head. "I'm not going to begin that all over again," she said rather drearily. "You made me look silly once, but you won't have a chance a second time. So long as you thought you might marry Miss Laura, you were afraid of the talk and kept out of my way. Now she has turned you down, you come after me again. I don't know why. Just for your own fun, I suppose. You can't deny you avoided me."

"No." He stood with his hands thrust deep into his pockets. "I don't. But I was in a devil of a hole, Caroline. I was engaged to marry a good girl, and a nice girl, and shortly after the wedding day was fixed I did a thing which only a cad would have done." He paused, Caroline gazing at him with wide eyes. Then he went on: "I borrowed a large sum of money from her."

"Is that all?" breathed Caroline. "I don't see what difference that made."

"Don't you? Well, perhaps not—but any man would," he answered. "I was faced with ruin unless I could tide things over, and I couldn't take the money and be philandering with another girl at the same time."

"You didn't seem to hold those views until the last week or two," she said.

"I had not borrowed the money before," he said shortly. "Though I knew well enough I was not doing the square thing there, either by you or her."

She looked at him with a keen, set, impersonal intentness in her gaze which he could not understand. "Then you are sure she does not care enough for you to marry you? She threw you over because she wanted to stop single?"

"No doubt of that," he said with a sort of rueful conviction. "Though, of course, being the girl she is, she was frightfully upset at the idea of behaving badly to me. As a matter of fact, she seemed so distressed during the whole interview that I couldn't help feeling ashamed of myself. I couldn't let her reproach herself so acutely; I had to tell her I—I wasn't broken-hearted."

"She would wonder why, didn't she?" said Caroline, in a tone which he could not understand.

"Yes," he answered. "So I told her."

"What did you say?"

He waited a moment, looking down at the slim figure outlined darkly against the immense radiance of the sea. But he did not touch her. This was a different thing indeed from that hot wooing on the top of the cliff.

"I told her," he answered bluntly, at last, "that I was in love with you and wanted to marry you."

"And she——?" Caroline did not respond any more than that; incredibly, to him, she was still thinking about Laura—— And he stood looking at her with the same odd mixture of curiosity and desire which had all along marked his pursuit of her, though beneath it there was now something deeper, more human, more permanent. He wanted to know—— But even when he did know, she would be his—his to take care of and fight for and help up in the world.

At last he gave the answer she was waiting for. "Laura took it quite differently from what I expected," he said. "She was awfully decent about it. I think she was relieved, in a way, to find she had not got me on her mind. She must have been afraid I should be very unhappy, of course. She would always be so sorry about anything like that, that I wonder she had the heart to throw me over, even though she didn't want me."

Caroline said nothing. Oddly enough, though she had not heard the sound of the waves before, the melancholy swish! swish! now echoed through her very soul. When she felt a salt taste on her lips she thought it was a drop of spray from the sea, then she felt the faint trickling sensation of another and another running down her cheeks.

"Caroline!" he said, putting his arm about her and bending his face to hers. "You're crying! What is it, little girl?"

She pulled herself away from him, sobbing out with a wild earnestness which he found incomprehensible: "No! No! You can't start yet. You have her kisses on your mouth yet."

"You didn't seem to mind that before," he said, suddenly white with anger. "I don't know why you should start to be jealous of Laura now everything is over."

"I'm not jealous," she said. "It is not that." Then she stopped short. He must believe what he liked, for she could not betray the secret of a girl whose love, she felt, was finer than her own.

"Well, you have no need to be jealous," he said. "She spoke nicely about you. She was awfully decent about it, and hoped you and she would be friends."

"Oh! I wish we could be," said Caroline, but deep down in her own consciousness she knew this would never happen; because it is not in human nature for a woman to cease being jealous of another who has done more than herself for the man she loves.

He stood there disconsolately, kicking a pebble. He had come hot-foot to claim her, never anticipating a check; and now she seemed to be somehow drifting farther and farther away from him.

"I don't know if you are still thinking about the money Laura lent me," he said at last. "I begin to wish now I hadn't told you. But I wanted to have everything quite straight." He paused. "As a matter of fact, I have paid it back. The bank was a bit awkward at first, but I was able to come to an arrangement with them a day or two ago, and I have repaid Laura what she lent me." He paused again, looking at her almost comically: "There, I hope you quite understand?"

They were indeed talking to each other more like enemies than lovers; and Caroline seemed to be more than ever withdrawn and aloof—for all her ignorance and simplicity of feeling—when she answered him in an inward brooding tone: "Yes, I understand." For she really saw neither Godfrey nor the shore, only Laura coming flushed out of the door marked "Private" behind the bank counter. For now—at last—she did see where it all led. She had to join issue with Laura to spare the pride of this man whom both loved. His faith in his own power of overcoming difficulties was the foundation on which his life was built, and they must not pull it from under him. She, at any rate, could not so humiliate him.

"The difficulty was only temporary," he went on, trying to find out what she was waiting for. "I tried to do too much business for my capital. But I'm bound to get on. We shall be all right."

"Don't!" she said sharply. "I don't care about money. I wasn't thinking about that."

"Then what's the matter?"

She looked at him dumbly, and something in her tear-stained face tugged irresistibly at his heartstrings. "Don't look like that," he said. "Let's forget all that has happened before. You don't mean you will turn me down, too?"

She shook her head, still unable to keep back the tears.

"Then why are you crying?" he said, putting his arm round her. "There's nothing to cry for, Carrie." He spoke to her soothingly, tenderly, as a man might to a child who was in trouble.

"Oh, Godfrey!" She drew herself away from him once more. "I aren't half as good as her. I aren't half as good as her. You'd have been a great deal happier and more comfortable with her."

"I know that," he said. "But I don't want to be happy and comfortable. I want to live." He caught hold of her hand, which he crushed so tightly that it hurt. "And I want you with me."

They heard a sudden noise from the cliff top where two boys raced and shouted, so they walked on. Feathery clots of foam blew before them on the sand, almost as if sea-flowers from the changeless ocean were being flung in the pathway of that which is unchangeable in human life.

After a while Caroline said with a start, waking out of her dream: "I wonder what Mrs. Bradford will say? But she won't be so upset as Miss Ethel would have been." She lowered her voice. "Do you know what Miss Panton said it was that actually killed Miss Ethel? It was everything being so different."

"Yes." He paused. "Well, thousands of people are dying from the same cause, I suppose, all over the world—middle-aged ones, that is." Then he strengthened his grasp on her arm. "But we're young. We're all right. Eh, Caroline?"



THE END