He looked down at the space of red tiles that separated them.  “That is rather remediable,” he observed.

“Do you think I am not in earnest?” she said.  “I am.  There is a real barrier; besides all these things I have mentioned there is something else that cuts me off.  I have a debt to pay you and until it is paid, if I were your own cousin, I could not stand on the same platform.”

“A debt?” he repeated the word in surprise.  His young cousin’s loan to Captain Polkington had slipped his memory, and even if it had not, its connection with the present would not have occurred to him.  Julia had been there, it is true, when the affair was talked of eighteen months ago, and he himself had unofficially paid the money to end the matter, but he never dreamed of connecting either her or himself with it now.  Still less would he have dreamed that she considered herself bound to pay him what her father had borrowed from another.

“What debt?” he asked, thinking the word must be hyperbolical, and meant to stand for something quite different, though he could not imagine what.

“You have forgotten?” she said.  “I thought you had; that only shows the distance more plainly; you have one standard for yourself and another for me.”

“Tell me what it is and let us see if we cannot compound it.”

But she shook her head.  “It can’t be compounded,” she said; “you will know when I pay it.”

“And when will that be?”

“Ten years, twenty perhaps, I don’t know.  I thought once or twice before I could pay it—­with the blue daffodil once, and once when I first got the cottage and things—­I thought, to be sure, I could do it; it seemed a Heaven-sent way.  But”—­with a little glint of self-derision—­“Heaven knows better than to send those sort of easy ways to the Polkingtons; they are ill-conditioned beasts who only behave when they are properly laden by fate, and not often then.  Now you know all about it, so won’t you say good-bye and go?”

“I don’t know about it and, what is more, I don’t care.  I am not going to let this unknown trifle, this scruple—­”

Just then there came the sound of voices outside; Mr. Gillat and Captain Polkington unwarily coming back before the coast was clear.

“Yes,” Johnny was saying, “he came to see me in town, you know—­or rather you, but you were out—­”

“He came to see me?  He”—­there was no mistaking the consternation in the Captain’s tone, nor his meaning either.

Julia and Rawson-Clew looked at one another; both had forgotten the Captain’s existence for a moment; now they were reminded, and though the reminder seemed incongruous it was perhaps opportune.

“There is father,” Julia said.

And he nodded.  One cannot make love to a man’s daughter almost in his presence, when the proviso of his death is an essential to any satisfaction.  Rawson-Clew went to the door.  “Good-bye,” he said, “for the present.”