“If the ship should come to-morrow, you would go out of my life?  You would go away and leave me here—­”

“No, no!” she cried, turning upon him suddenly.  “You could not stay here.  You shall not!”

“But, dearest love, I am bound to stay—­I cannot go And, God help me, I want to stay.  If I could go into your world and take you unto myself forever—­if you will tell me now that some day you may forget your world and come to live in mine—­then, ah, then, it would be different!  But without you I have no choice of abiding place.  Here, as well as anywhere.”

She put her hands over her eyes.

“I cannot bear the thought of—­of leaving you behind—­of leaving you here to die at the hands of those beasts down there.  Hollingsworth, I implore you—­come!  If the opportunity comes—­and it will, I know—­you will leave the island with the rest of us?”

“Not unless I am commanded to do so by the man who sent me here to serve these beasts, as you call them.”

“They do not want you!  They are your enemies!”

“Time will tell,” he said sententiously.  He leaned over and took her hand in his.  “You do love me?”

“You know I do—­yes, yes!” she cried from her heart, keeping her face resolutely turned away from him.  “I am sick with love for you.  Why should I deny the thing that speaks so loudly for itself—­my heart!  Listen!  Can you not hear it beating?  It is hurting me—­yes, it is hurting me!”

He trembled at this exhibition of released, unchecked passion, and yet he did not clasp her in his arms.

“Will you come into my world, Genevra?” he whispered.  “All my life would be spent in guarding the love you would give to me—­all my life given to making you love me more and more until there will be no other world for you to think of.”

“I wish that I had not been born,” she sobbed.  “I cannot, dearest—­I cannot change the laws of fate.  I am fated—­I am doomed to live forever in the dreary world of my fathers.  But how can I give you up?  How can I give up your love?  How can I cast you out of my life?”

“You do not love Prince Karl?”

“How can you ask?” she cried fiercely.  “Am I not loving you with all my heart and soul?”

“And you would leave me behind if the ship should come?” he persisted, with cruel insistence.  “You will go back and marry that—­him?  Loving me, you will marry him?” Her head dropped upon her arm.  He turned cold as death.  “God help and God pity you, my love.  I never knew before what your little world means to you.  I give you up to it.  I crawl back into the one you look down upon with scorn.  I shall not again ask you to descend to the world where love is.”

Her hand lay limp in his.  They stared bleakly out into the night and no word was spoken.

The minutes became an hour, and yet they sat there with set faces, bursting hearts, unseeing eyes.

Below them in the shadows, Bobby Browne was pacing the embankment, his wife drawn close to his side.  Three men, Britt, Saunders and Bowles, were smoking their pipes on the edge of the terrace.  Their words came up to the two in the gallery.