‘Caught me?’

’Well, yes, caught you.  I do feel that I have caught you,—­almost.  I do feel,—­almost,—­that I ought to have had nothing to do with you.  From the beginning of it all I knew that I ought to have nothing to say to you.  You are too good for me.’  Then she rose from her place as though to leave him.  ‘I will go down now,’ she said, ’because I know you will have many things to do.  To-morrow, when we get up, we shall be in the harbour, and you will be on shore quite early.  There will be no time for a word of farewell then.  I will meet you again here just before we go to bed,—­say at half-past ten.  Then we will arrange, if we can arrange, how we may meet again.’

And so she glided away from him, and he was left alone, sitting on the spar.  Now, at any rate, he had engaged himself.  There could not be any doubt about that.  He certainly could not be justified in regarding himself as free because she had told him that she would give him time to think of it.  Of course he was engaged to marry her.  When a man has been successful in his wooing he is supposed to be happy.  He asked himself whether he was proud of the result of this intimacy.  She had told him,—­she herself,—­that she had ‘caught him’, meaning thereby that he had been taken as a rabbit with a snare or a fish with a baited hook.  If it had been so, surely she would not herself have said so.  And yet he was aware how common it is for a delinquent to cover his own delinquency by declaring it.  ‘Of course I am idle,’ says the idle one, escaping the disgrace of his idleness by his honesty.  ‘I have caught you!’ There is something soothing to the vanity in such a declaration from a pretty woman.  That she should have wished to catch you is something;—­something that the net should itself be so pleasant, with its silken meshes!  But the declaration may not the less be true and the fact unpleasant.  In the matter of matrimony a man does not wish to be caught; and Caldigate, fond as he was of her, acknowledged that what she said was true.

He leant back in a corner that was made by the hatchway, and endeavoured to think over his life and prospects.  If this were a true engagement, then must he cease altogether to think of Hester Bolton.  Then must that dream be abandoned.  It is of no use to the most fervid imagination to have a castle projected in Spain from which all possible foundation has been taken away.  In his dreams of life a man should never dream that which is altogether impossible.  There had been something in the thought of Hester Bolton which had taken him back from the roughnesses of his new life, from the doubtful respectability of Mrs. Smith, from the squalor of the second-class from the whisky-laden snores of Dick Shand, to a sweeter, brighter, cleaner world.  Till this engagement had been absolutely spoken he could still indulge in that romance, distant and unreal as it was.  But now,—­now it seemed to be brought in upon him very forcibly that he must rid his thoughts of Hester Bolton,—­or else rid his life of Mrs. Smith.