He paused a moment, then went on in a dogged note:  “I told him—­of a certain intention of mine.  He tackled me about it first, was absolutely intolerable.  I just couldn’t hold myself in.  And then somehow we got violent.  It was his fault.  Anyway, he began it.”

“You haven’t told me—­yet—­what you quarrelled about,” said Avery, with a sinking heart.

He shrugged his shoulders without looking at her.  “It doesn’t matter, does it?”

She made answer with a certain firmness.  “Yes, I think it does.”

“Well, then,”—­abruptly he raised himself and faced round, his dark eyes raised to hers,—­“I told him, Avery, that if I couldn’t marry the woman I loved, I would never marry at all.”

There was no sullenness about him now, only steadfast purpose.  He looked her full in the face as he said it, and she quivered a little before the mastery of his look.

He laid a hand upon her knee as she sat above him in sore perplexity.  “Would you have me do anything else?” he said.

She answered him with a conscious effort.  “I want you to love—­and marry—­the right woman.”

He uttered a queer, unsteady laugh and leaned his head against her.  “Oh, my dear,” he said, “there is no other woman but you in all the world.”

Something fiery that was almost like a dart of pain went through Avery at his words.  She moved instinctively, but it was not in shrinking.  After a moment she laid her hand upon his.

“Piers,” she said, “I can’t bear hurting you.”

“You wouldn’t hurt a fly,” said Piers.

She smiled faintly.  “Not if I could help it.  But that doesn’t prove that I am fond of flies.  And now, Piers, I am going to ask a very big thing of you.  I wonder if you will do it.”

“I wonder,” said Piers.

He had not moved at her touch, yet she felt his fingers close tensely as they lay upon her knee, and she guessed that he was still striving to control the inner tumult that had so nearly overwhelmed him a few minutes before.

“I know it is a big thing,” she said.  “Yet—­for my sake if you like—­I want you to do it.”

“I will do anything for your sake,” he made passionate answer.

“Thank you,” she said gently.  “Then, Piers, I want you—­please—­to go back to Sir Beverley at once, and make it up.”

He withdrew his hand sharply from hers, and sat up, turning his back upon her.  “No!” he said harshly.  “No!”

“Please, Piers!” she said very earnestly.

He locked his arms round his knees and sat in silence, staring moodily out to sea.

“Please, Piers!” she said again, and lightly touched his shoulder with her fingers.

He hunched the shoulder away from her with a gesture of boyish impatience, and then abruptly, as if realizing what he had done, he turned back to her, caught the hand, and pressed it to his lips.

“I’m a brute, dear.  Forgive me!  Of course—­if you wish it—­I’ll go back.  But as to making it up, well—­” he gulped once or twice—­“it doesn’t rest only with me, you know.”