She laughed again faintly.  “I won’t do that.  I’ll be a model of discretion.  You may not think it, but I am—­very discreet.”

“I am sure of it,” said Burke.

“No, you’re not.  You’re not in the least sure of anything where I am concerned.  You’ve only known me—­two days.”

He laughed a little.  “It doesn’t matter how long it has taken.  I know you.”

She laughed with him, and sat up, “What must you have thought of me when I told you you hadn’t shaved?”

He took out his pipe again.  “If you’d been a boy, I should probably have boxed your ears,” he said.  “By the way, why did you get up when I told you to stay in bed?”

“Because I knew best what was good for me,” said Sylvia.  “Have you got such a thing as a cigarette?”

He got up.  “Yes, in my room.  Wait while I fetch them!”

“Oh, don’t go on purpose!” she said.  “I daresay I shouldn’t like your kind, thanks all the same.”

He went nevertheless, and she leaned back with her face to the hills and waited.  The moon was just topping the great summits.  She watched it with a curious feeling of weakness.  It had not been a particularly agitating interview, but she knew that she had just passed a cross-roads, in her life.

She had taken a road utterly unknown to her and though she had taken it of her own accord, she did not feel that the choice had really been hers.  Somehow her faculties were numbed, were paralyzed.  She could not feel the immense importance of what she had done, or realize that she had finally, of her own action, severed her life from Guy’s.  He had become such a part of herself that she could not all at once divest herself of that waiting feeling, that confident looking forward to a future with him.  And yet, strangely, her memory of him had receded into distance, become dim and remote.  In Burke’s presence she could not recall him at all.  The two personalities, dissimilar though she knew them to be, seemed in some curious fashion to have become merged into one.  She could not understand her own feelings, but she was conscious of relief that the die was cast.  Whatever lay before her, she was sure of one thing.  Burke Ranger would be her safeguard against any evil that might arise and menace her.  His protection was of the solid quality that would never fail her.  She felt firm ground beneath her feet at last.

At the sound of his returning step, she turned with the moonlight on her face and smiled up at him with complete confidence.

CHAPTER XII

THE STALE

Whenever in after days Sylvia looked back upon her marriage, it seemed to be wrapped in a species of hazy dream like the early mists on that far-off range of hills.