“I want to go up last,” she said, “and just behind you, so that no one shall see what a little fool I am making of myself.”

But by some subtle understanding already it was felt amongst that group of people, quick to perceive troubles of the emotions, that something was amiss between the pair.  They were left alone upon the deck.  Stella by chance looking southwards to the starlit gloom, Luttrell to the north, where still the daylight played in blue and palest green and the delicate changing fires of the opal.

“What will you do, Stella?” Luttrell asked gently.

“I think I will go and live in the country,” she replied.

“It will be lonely, child.”

“There will be ghosts, my dear, to keep me company,” she answered with a wan smile.  “People like me always have to be a good deal alone, anyway.  I shall be, of course, lonelier, now that I have no one to play with,” and the smile vanished from her lips.  She flung up her face towards the skies, letting her grief have its way upon that empty deck.

“So we shall never be together—­just you and I—­alone again,” she said, forcing herself to realise that unintelligible thing.  Her thoughts ran back over the year—­the year of their alliance—­and she saw all of its events flickering vividly before her, as they say drowning people do.  “Oh, Wub, what a cruel mistake you made when you went out of your way to be kind,” she cried, with the tears streaming down her face; and Luttrell winced.

“Yes, that’s true,” he admitted remorsefully.  “I never dreamed what would come of it.”

“You should have left me alone.”

Amongst the flickering pictures of the year the first was the clearest.  A great railway station in the West of England, a train drawn up at the departure platform, herself with a veil drawn close over her face, half running, half walking in a pitiful anguish towards the train; and then a man at her elbow.  Harry Luttrell.

“I have reserved a compartment.  I suspected that things were not going to turn out well.  I thought the long journey to London alone would be terrible.  If things had turned out right, you would not have seen me.”

She had let him place her in a carriage, look after her wants as if she had been a child, hold her in his arms, tend her with the magnificent sympathy of his silence.  That had been the real beginning.  Stella had known him as the merest of friends before.  She had met him here and there at a supper party, at a dancing club, at some Bohemian country house; and then suddenly he had guessed what others had not, and foolishly had gone out of his way to be kind.

“She would have died if I hadn’t travelled with her,” Luttrell argued silently.  “She would have thrown herself out of the carriage, or when she reached home she would have——­” and his argument stopped, and he glanced at her uneasily.

Undisciplined, was the epithet she had used of herself.  You never knew what crazy thing she might do.  There was daintiness but no order in her life; the only law she knew was given to her by a fastidious taste.