Julia tugged at her skirt; the chopping-block was on the hem and he on it so that she could not get free.  “Will you please go,” she said, with a catch in her breath.  That is the worst of these half-suppressed, unspent storms of tears, they have such a tendency to return and break out again inconveniently.

“If it were not for Captain Polkington would you have sent me away?” he asked.

“Y—­e—­s,” she answered, fighting with her tears.  “Oh, go!  Please, please go!”

She crumpled herself into a small miserable heap and he leaned over the block and drew her into his arms.

For a moment she struggled, burrowing her head into his coat; there was a good deal of burrowing and not much struggling.  “No, you wouldn’t,” he said to her hair, “you would have married me.”

“I might have said I would, but I shouldn’t really have done it,” she contended without looking up.  “I shouldn’t when it came to the point.  You had better let me go, I am spoiling your coat, my face is all wet—­and I don’t know where my handkerchief is.”

“Take mine, you will find it somewhere.  Tell me, why would you not have married me when it came to the point?  Because your courage failed you?”

No answer; then, “I can’t find that handkerchief.”

“You have not tried.  Are you afraid to try?  Are you afraid of me?  Is that why you would not have married me—­you would have been afraid to live at close quarters with me?  Do you still think you don’t know me well enough?”

“I don’t know your name.”

The answer was ridiculous, but he knew how the ridiculous touched even tragedies for Julia.

“Hubert Farquhar Rawson-Clew,” he said solemnly.  “Now—­”

But whatever was to have followed was prevented, for at that moment she looked up, and for some reason, suddenly decided things had gone far enough, and so freed herself.

“I don’t think it matters much what I should have done,” she said, “or why, either.  Father is not dead; you ought to know better than to talk about such a thing; it is bad taste.”

“Does that matter in the simple life?  I thought when you retired you were going to dispense with falsity and pretences, and say and do honestly what you honestly thought, when it did not hurt other people’s feelings.”

“So I do,” she answered; “that is why, when I thought I was alone just now, I asked out loud how it was that father was still alive.  Since then I have seen.”

“What have you seen?”

“That it is to prevent me from making a great muddle of things.  If he had been dead I dare say I should have married you—­I may as well confess it since you know—­and we both should have repented it ever afterwards.  As it is, if I were free to-morrow, I would know better than to do it.”

He did not seem much troubled by the last statement.  “We should have had to talk things over,” he said.

“No, talking wouldn’t have been any good,” she answered; “there is a great distance between us.”