The words were uttered and beyond recall.  He looked her straight in the face as he spoke them, but an instant later he turned and stared out over the wide, calm sea in a stillness that was somehow more forcible even than his low, half-strangled speech had been.

Juliet stood silent also, almost as if she were waiting for him to recover his balance.  Her eyes also were gazing straight before her to that far mysterious sky-line.  They were very grave and rather sad.

He broke the silence after many seconds.  “You will never speak to me again after this.”

“I hope I shall,” she said gently.

He wheeled and faced her.  “You’re not angry then?”

She shook her head.  “No.”

His eyes flashed over her with amazing swiftness.  “I almost wish you were,” he said.

“But why?” she said.

“Because I should know then it mattered a little.  Now I know it doesn’t.  I am just one of the many.  Isn’t that it?  There are so many of us that one more or less doesn’t count either way.”  He laughed ruefully.  “Well, I won’t repeat the offence.  Even your patience must have its limits.  Shall we go back?”

It was then that Juliet turned, moved by an impulse so strangely urgent that she could not pause to analyse it.  She held out her hand to him, quickly, shyly, and as he gripped and held it, she spoke, her voice tremulous, breathless, barely coherent.

“I am not—­offended.  I am—­very—­very—­deeply—­honoured.  Only you—­you—­don’t understand.”

He kept her hand closely in his own.  His grasp vibrated with electric force, but he had himself in check.  “You are more generous than I deserve,” he said, his voice sunk to a whisper.  “Perhaps—­some day—­understanding will come.  May I hope for that?”

She did not answer him, but for one intimate second her eyes looked straight into his.  Then with a little, sobbing breath she slipped her hand free.

“We—­are forgetting Robin,” she said, with an effort.

He turned at once.  “By George, yes!  I’m afraid I had forgotten him,” he said.

They walked back along the shore side by side.

PART II

CHAPTER I

THE WAND OF OFFICE

Robin was in disgrace.  He crouched in a sulky heap in a far corner of the schoolroom, and glowered across the empty desks and benches at his elder brother who sat in the place of authority at his writing-table with a litter of untidy exercise-books in front of him.  There was a long, thin cane also at his elbow that had the look of a somewhat sinister wand of office.  He was correcting book after book with a species of forced patience, that was not without an element of exasperation.

The evening sunlight slanted through the leaded windows.  They were open to their widest extent, but the place was oppressively close.  There was a brooding sense of storm in the atmosphere.  Suddenly, as if in some invisible fashion a set limit had been reached and passed, Richard Green lifted his head from his work.  His keen eyes sent a flashing glance down the long, bare room.