“Would you stay, Harry, if I asked you to?” she said in almost a whisper.  She had not meant to put the question quite in that way, but somehow it had asked itself.

He looked at her with his soft brown eyes, the long lashes shading their tender brilliancy.  He had guessed nothing of the newly awakened throb in her heart; only his situation stared him in the face, and in this she had no controlling interest; nor could she now that she loved somebody else.

“No, Kate, it wouldn’t alter anything.  It would be putting off the day when it would all have to be done over again; and then it would be still worse because of the hopes it had raised.”

“Do you really mean, Harry, that you would not stay if I asked you?” It was not her heart which was speaking, but the pride of the woman who had always had her own way.

“I certainly do,” he answered emphatically, his voice ringing clear.  “Every day I lose is just so much taken from a decent, independent life.”

A sudden revulsion of feeling swept through her.  This was the last thing she had expected from Harry.  What had come over him that he should deny her anything?—­he who had always obeyed her slightest wish.  Then a new thought entered her head—­why should she humble herself to ask any more questions?  With a quick movement she gained her feet and stood toying with her dress, arranging the lace scarf about her throat, tightening the wide strings that held her teacup of a bonnet close to her face.  She raised her eyes and stole a glance at him.  The lips were still firmly set with the resolve that had tightened them, but his eyes were brimming tears.

As suddenly as her pride had risen did it die out.  All the tenderness of her nature welled up.  She made one step in his direction.  She was about to speak, but he had not moved, nor did his face relax.  She saw that nothing could shake his resolve; they were as far apart as if the seas already rolled between them.  She held out her hand, and with that same note of infinite pathos which he knew so well when she spoke straight from her heart, said as she laid her fingers in his: 

“Good-by, and God bless you, Harry.”

“Good-by, Kate,” he murmured in barely audible tones.  “May I—­may I—­kiss you on the forehead, as I always used to do when I left you—­”

She bent her head:  he leaned over and touched the spot with his lips as reverently as a sinner kisses the garment of a saint, then, choking down her tears, all her body unstrung, her mind in a whirl, she turned and passed out of the park.

That same afternoon Kate called her father into her little sitting-room at the top of the stairs and shut the door.

“Harry Rutter is going to sea as a common sailor on one of the ships leaving here in a couple of days.  Can you find out which one?—­it may be one of your own.”  He was still perfunctory agent of the line.

“Young Rutter going to sea!”—­the nomenclature of “my dear Harry” had ended since the colonel had disinherited him.  “Well—­that is news!  I suspect that will be the best place for him; then if he plays any of his pranks there will be somebody around with a cat-o’-nine-tails to take it out of him.  Going to sea, is he?”