“I will tell you—­now.”  The soft difference in the tone of the last word was too femininely subtle for him to understand.  “That afternoon, when my father was talking to you all in the front room downstairs—­do you remember?”

“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently.

“I heard something—­I was at the door.”

“It was you, then, and not Thalassa, who looked through the door!” he said, glancing at her curiously.

“I did not mean to listen,” she replied, flushing slightly.  “I was going out to the cliffs—­to the Moon Rock.  I was very unhappy, and wanted to be alone with my thoughts.  On my way past the door something my father was saying reached me.  It concerned me.  I did not take it in at first, or understand what it really meant.  As I stood there, wondering, my eyes met my aunt’s through the opening in the door, and I saw her spring to her feet.  I hurried away because I did not want to see her.  I wanted to think over what I had just heard, to try and understand what it meant.

“I went down to the Moon Rock, and sat there, thinking and thinking.  They were so strange and terrible, those words I had overheard, but they were so few that I did not really guess then all that they meant.  All I knew was that there was some dreadful secret behind them, some secret of my mother’s which had something to do with me.  I wished that I had heard more.  As I sat there, wondering what I ought to do, you came—­”

“To tell you that I loved you, that I shall love you as long as I live,” he interrupted eagerly.

Again a faint flush rose to her cheeks, but she hurried on:  “I could not tell you that I loved you while those dreadful words of my father were ringing in my ears.  I wanted to see him first, to question him, to know if I had partly guessed the truth, or if there was any loophole of escape for me.  Oh, do not think any worse of me now if I tell you that I loved you then and shall always love you.  I wanted to tell you so that day by the Moon Rock, but I knew that I must not.”

“Why not?” His louder voice broke in on her subdued tones impetuously.  “You should not have sent me away, Sisily.  That was wrong.  It has brought much misery upon us both.”

“It was not wrong!” she replied, with unexpected firmness and a momentary hardness of glance, which reminded him of her father’s look.  “It was because I was nobody—­less than that, if what I thought was true.  There was your position to think of.  You were to come into the title—­my father told me that before.”

“Damn the title!” the young man burst out furiously.  “I told you that day I would have nothing to do with it.  Why did you think about that?”

“Because I’ve heard of nothing else all my life, I suppose,” she rejoined with the ghost of a smile.  “I couldn’t tell you then that I loved you, because of it, and other things.  Now, it is different.  It does not matter what I say—­now.”  She spoke these words with an underlying note of deep sadness, and went on:  “When you told me that you loved me I saw my duty plainly.  I knew I must go away and hide myself from you, from everybody, go somewhere where nobody knew me, where I would never be known.  But I wanted to see my father first, to make sure.”