“Beloved!  I love you! love you! love you!  And you?  Tell me you love me!  Why, you dare not look me in the face and say no!  You love me, dear!  You are part of me; you are bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh!  Sorrow shall not touch you when you are all mine, your joys shall be my joys!  And—­beloved, my children shall be your children!”

With a sudden movement Leonie wrenched herself from his arms and on to her feet, whilst a driving cloud surrounded them, and a growl of thunder came over from Lundy Island way.

“Love you!” cried the girl.  “Yes!  I love you, if that is the right word to describe what it is I have in my heart for you.  No! don’t touch me!  Listen, I would live for you, die for you in love.  Pain through you would be joy, joy through you would be heaven.”

She clasped her hands to her breast, then threw them out towards him, palm uppermost, in a wonderful gesture of passionate surrender, but her face was terrible to see, with eyes like burned out fires, and great smears of blood across her mouth and cheek.

“All that I have for you and more—­oh! much more—­but—­I—­I cannot marry you!”

The glass went down with a little clatter upon the coldest of life’s cold marble slabs as Jan Cuxson, grasping the girl’s arms, pulled her roughly towards him.

That he had caught the arm right on the lacerated wound he had no idea as he stood looking down into the eyes which were on a level with the top button, of his coat.

“Beloved! beloved!  You are tired, distraught!  You don’t know what you are saying!  You are to go straight home and sleep, for hours, then come out refreshed and gloriously happy to meet me where and when you like!  And we will fix everything down to the very smallest detail, oh! dear heart, think of it! and this day week we will sail for India!”

CHAPTER XXII

  “That day is a day of wrath—­a day of clouds
  and thick darkness.”—­The Bible.

“India!” repeated Leonie, “India!”

She flung round towards the sea, standing on the very edge of the cliff, the violence of the wind against her the only barrier between her and certain death.

“Tell me,” she cried, pointing to the heaving, raging mass of waters with a hand above which shone dully a blood-soaked bandage.  “Tell me what I did to myself down there just now.  I awoke in a different place from which I went to sleep.  I had no—­I am cut and bruised.  Terrible things happen wherever I am—­they follow me.  I woke one night in a pitch dark room and saw two green eyes staring at me from the wall.  They were my eyes—­reflected in a looking-glass—­mine—­they shine at night like a cat’s—­and there’s a voice calling—­often.  Oh!  I tell you I’m haunted, bewitched, cursed!”

“Come to me, beloved.”

She turned and went like a child into the outstretched arms, and he, having wet his handkerchief on the mist-damped grass, bent the weary head back against his shoulder, and wiped away the blood-stains from the despairing face.