somebody else—­somebody who cares enough for a woman to risk everything for her, and just take her and make her do what’s best for herself whether she likes it or not.  Now if somebody like that were to come to my lady, and get her out of her trouble,’ I said. . . .  ‘Somebody will,’ said he.  ’Make your mind easy about that.  Somebody will,’ he said, and then he went on walking to and fro.”

Price told this story as if she thought she was bringing me the gladdest of glad tidings; but the idea that Martin had come back into my life to master me, to take possession of me, to claim me as his own (just as he did when I was a child) and thereby compel me to do what I had promised his mother and Father Dan not to do—­this was terrifying.

But there was a secret joy in it too, and every woman will know what I mean if I say that my heart was beating high with the fierce delight of belonging to somebody when I returned to the boudoir where Martin was waiting to sit down to dinner.

Then came a great surprise.

Martin was standing with his back to the fire-place, and I saw in a moment that the few hours which had intervened had changed him as much as they had changed me.

“Helloa!  Better, aren’t we?” he cried, but he was now cold, almost distant, and even his hearty voice seemed to have sunk to a kind of nervous treble.

I could not at first understand this, but after a while I began to see that we two had reached the point beyond which it was impossible to go without encountering the most tremendous fact of our lives—­my marriage and all that was involved by it.

During dinner we spoke very little.  He seemed intentionally not to look at me.  The warm glances of his sea-blue eyes, which all the afternoon had been making the colour mount to my cheeks, had gone, and it sent a cold chill to my heart to look across the table at his clouded face.  But sometimes when he thought my own face was down I was conscious that his eyes were fixed on me with a questioning, almost an imploring gaze.  His nervousness communicated itself to me.  It was almost as if we had begun to be afraid of each other and were hovering on the brink of fatal revelations.

When dinner was over, the table cleared and the servants gone, I could bear the strain no longer, so making excuse of a letter I had to write to the Reverend Mother I sat down at my desk, whereupon Martin lit a cigar and said he would stroll over the headland.

I heard his footsteps going down the stone stairway from the balcony; I heard their soft thud on the grass of the lawn; I heard their sharper crackle on the gravel of the white path, and then they mingled with the surge and wash of the flowing tide and died away in the distance.

I rose from the desk, and going over to the balcony door looked out into the darkness.  It was a beautiful, pathetic, heart-breaking night.  No moon, but a perfect canopy of stars in a deep blue sky.  The fragrance of unseen flowers—­sweetbriar and rose as well as ripening fruit—­came up from the garden.  There was no wind either, not even the rustle of a leaf, and the last bird of evening was silent.  All the great orchestra of nature was still, save for the light churning of the water running in the glen and the deep organ song of the everlasting sea.