Clarice gave a laugh.  ‘Then we are to expect you in a fortnight?’

‘Yes, in a fortnight,’ and he laid a significance upon the word which Clarice did not mistake.  It was spoken with an accent of entreaty.

But indeed she needed no emphasis to fix it in her mind.  The word besieged her; she caught herself uttering it, and while she uttered it the time itself seemed to have slipped by.  She had but to say ‘No’ at the end of the fortnight, she assured herself, and she knew that she would only have to say it once.  But the memory of that Sunday afternoon in Beaufort Gardens lay upon her like a load crushing all the comfort out of her knowledge.

Drake caught his steamer at Southampton, and the President at Madeira.  He was received warmly as an old acquaintance, warily as a negotiator.  However, he extracted the concession as the boat passed up Southampton Water, and disembarked with a signed memorandum in his pocket.  At Southampton post-office he received a bundle of letters which had been forwarded to him from his chambers in London.  He slipped them into his coat, and went at once on board the Guernsey steamer.  At Guernsey, the next morning, he embarked on the little boat which runs between Guernsey and Sark.  The sun was a golden fire upon the water; the race of the tides no more than a ripple.  The island stuck out its great knees into the sea and lolled in the heat.  Half-way across Drake bethought him of the letters.  He took them out and glanced over the envelopes.  One was in Clarice’s handwriting.  It announced to him her engagement with Sidney Mallinson.

CHAPTER XI

Of Drake’s arrival at the Seigneurie Mrs. Willoughby wrote some account to Hugh Fielding, who was taking the waters for no ailment whatever at Marienbad.  ‘I was surprised to see him,’ she wrote, ’because Clarice told me that she had written to him.  Clarice was running down the stairs when he came into the hall.  She stopped suddenly as she caught sight of him, clutched at the balustrade, slipped a heel upon the edge of the step, and with a cry pitched straight into his arms at the bottom.  Mr. Mallinson came out of the library while he was holding her.  Clarice was not hurt, however, and Mr. Drake set her down.  “I didn’t pass through London,” he said, and he seemed to be apologising.  “My letters were forwarded to Southampton, and I only opened them on the Sark steamer.”  Then he congratulated them both.  I spoke to Mr. Drake the same evening on the terrace here, foolishly hinting the feminine consolation that he was well free from a girl of Clarice’s fickleness.  He was in arms on the instant.  One gets at truth only by experiment, and through repeated mistakes.  Why except women’s hearts from the same law?  I give his opinion, not his words.  He doesn’t talk of “women’s hearts.”  You know his trick of suggesting when it comes to talk of the feelings.  I slid into a worse blunder