“Not quite so much now as before you came,” she answered.  “I am proud, you know, that you asked me,” and putting her troubles aside, she smiled at him bravely, as though it was he who needed comforting.  “Good-by!  Let me hear of you through your success.”

So again they said good-by at the time of sunset.  Chayne mounted into the landau and drove back along the road to Weymouth.  “So that’s the end,” said Sylvia.  She opened the door and passed again into the garden.  Through the window of the library she saw her father and Walter Hine, watching, it seemed, for her appearance.  It was borne in upon her suddenly that she could not meet them or speak with them, and she ran very quickly round the house to the front door, and escaped unaccosted to her room.

In the library Hine turned to Garratt Skinner with one of his rare flashes of shrewdness.

“She didn’t want to meet us,” he said, jealously.  “Do you think she cares for him?”

“I think,” replied Garratt Skinner with a smile, “that Captain Chayne will not trouble us with his company again.”

CHAPTER XIV

AN OLD PASSION BETRAYS A NEW SECRET

Garratt Skinner, however, was wrong.  He was not aware of the great revolution which had taken place in Chayne; and he misjudged his tenacity.  Chayne, like many another man, had mapped out his life only to find that events would happen in a succession different to that which he had ordained.  He had arranged to devote his youth and the earlier part of his manhood entirely to his career, if the career were not brought to a premature end in the Alps.  That possibility he had always foreseen.  He took his risks with full knowledge, setting the gain against them, and counting them worth while.  If then he lived, he proposed at some indefinite time, in the late thirties, to fall in love and marry.  He had no parents living; there was the empty house upon the Sussex Downs; and the small estate which for generations had descended from father to son.  Marriage was thus a recognized event.  Only it was thrust away into an indefinite future.  But there had come an evening which he had not foreseen, when, sorely grieved by the loss of his great friend, he had fallen in with a girl who gave with open hands the sympathy he needed, and claimed, by her very reticence and humility, his sympathy in return.  A day had followed upon that evening; and thenceforth the image of Sylvia standing upon the snow-ridge of the Aiguille d’Argentiere, with a few strips of white cloud sailing in a blue sky overhead, the massive pile of Mont Blanc in front, freed to the sunlight which was her due, remained fixed and riveted in his thoughts.  He began in imagination to refer matters of moment to her judgment; he began to save up little events of interest that he might remember to tell them to her.  He understood that he had a companion, even when he was alone, a condition which he had not anticipated even for his late thirties.  And he came to the conclusion that he had not that complete ordering of his life on which he had counted.  He was not, however, disappointed.  He seized upon the good thing which had come to him with a great deal of wonder and a very thankful heart; and he was not disposed to let it lightly go.