“In front of her,” Faircloth said, his chin still in his hands and eyes gazing away to the Bar—­“earth and pebbles banked up into a flat-topped mound, upon which stood your shoes filled with sprays of hedge fruit and yellow button-chrysanthemums—­stolen too, I suppose, from one of the gardens at Lampit.  They grow freely there.  Your silk stockings hung round her neck, a posy of flowers twisted into them.—­When I came on this exhibition, I can’t quite tell you how I felt.  It raised Cain in me to think of that degraded, misbegotten creature pawing over and playing about with anything which had belonged to you.  I was for making Sclanders, his father, bring him over and give him the thrashing of his life, right there before the proofs of his sins.”

“But you didn’t,” Damaris cried.  “You didn’t.  What do my shoes and stockings matter?  I oughtn’t to have left them on the shore.  It was putting temptation in his way.”

Faircloth looked at her smiling.

“No I didn’t, and for two reasons.  One that I knew—­even then—­you would find excuses, plead for mercy, as you have just now.  Another, those flowers.  If I had found—­well—­what I might have found, oh! he should have had the stick or the dog-whip without stint.  But one doesn’t practise devil-worship with flowers.  It seemed to me some craving after beauty was there, as if the poor germ of a soul groped out of the darkness towards what is fair and sweet.  I dared not hound it back into the darkness, close down any dim aspiration after God it might have.  So I left its pitiful joss-house inviolate, the moan of the wind and sighing of the great reed-beds making music for such strange rites of worship as have been, or may be, practised within.  Any god is better than none—­that’s my creed, at least.  And to defile any man’s god—­however trumpery—­unless you’re amazingly sure you’ve a better one to offer him in place of it is to sin against the Holy Ghost.”

Faircloth rose to his feet.

“Time’s up”—­he said.  “I must go.  Here is farewell to the most beautiful day of my life.—­But see, Damaris”—­

And he knelt down, in front of her.

“Leave your shoes and stockings cast away on the Bar and thereby open the door—­for some people—­on to the kingdom of heaven, if you like.  But don’t, don’t, if you’ve the smallest mercy for my peace of mind ever wander about there again alone.  I’ve a superstition against it.  Something unhappy will come of it.  It isn’t right.  It isn’t safe.  When—­when I called you and you answered me through the mist, I had a horrible fear I was too late.  You see I care—­and the caring, after to-day, very certainly will not grow less.  Take somebody, one of your women, always, with you.  Promise me never to be out by yourself.”

Wondering, inexpressibly touched, Damaris put her hands on his shoulders.  His hands sprang to cover them.

“Of course, I promise,” she said.

And, closing her eyes, put up her lips to be kissed.