John drew a long breath.

“I don’t believe there is another such view in the world,” he said.  “I do not wonder that this is your favorite spot.”

“Yes,” she said, “you should see the grounds—­the whole place is superb—­but this is the glory of it all, and I have brought you straight here because I wanted to see it with you, and this may be the only opportunity.”

“What do you mean?” he asked apprehensively.

“You heard Mr. Ruggles’s question about the cable dispatch?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Well,” she said, “our plans have been very much upset by some things he has heard from home.  We came on from Algiers ten days earlier than we had intended, and if the reply to Mr. Ruggles’s cable is unfavorable, we are likely to depart for Genoa to-morrow and take the steamer for home on Monday.  The reason why I did not send a note to your bankers,” she added, “was that we came on the same boat that I intended to write by; and Mr. Hartleigh’s man has inquired for you every day at Cook’s so that Mr. Hartleigh might know of your coming and call upon you.”

John gave a little exclamation of dismay.  Her face was very still as she gazed out over the sea with half-closed eyes.  He caught the scent of the violets in the bosom of her white dress.

“Let us sit down,” she said at last.  “I have something I wish to say to you.”

He made no rejoinder as they seated themselves, and during the moment or two of silence in which she seemed to be meditating how to begin, he sat bending forward, holding his stick with both hands between his knees, absently prodding holes in the gravel.

“I think,” she began, “that if I did not believe the chances were for our going to-morrow, I would not say it to-day.”  John bit his lip and gave the gravel a more vigorous punch.  “But I have felt that I must say it to you some time before we saw the last of each other, whenever that time should be.”

“Is it anything about what happened on board ship?” he asked in a low voice.

“Yes,” she replied, “it concerns all that took place on board ship, or nearly all, and I have had many misgivings about it.  I am afraid that I did wrong, and I am afraid, too, that in your secret heart you would admit it.”

“No, never!” he exclaimed.  “If there was any wrong done, it was wholly of my own doing.  I was alone to blame.  I ought to have remembered that you were married, and perhaps—­yes, I did remember it in a way, but I could not realize it.  I had never seen or heard of your husband, or heard of your marriage.  He was a perfectly unreal person to me, and you—­you seemed only the Mary Blake that I had known, and as I had known you.  I said what I did that night upon an impulse which was as unpremeditated as it was sudden.  I don’t see how you were wrong.  You couldn’t have foreseen what took place—­and——­”

“Have you not been sorry for what took place?” she asked, with her eyes on the ground.  “Have you not thought the less of me since?”