"That means that you love him?"

She faced round angrily.

"How dare you suggest such things of me? Do you think that women like I are made the same as slippers, to wait till footsore wanderers have need of them? Do you imagine I would waste an eyelash in weeping for milk wantonly spilt?"

"Yet you cried?" he ventured, very softly.

"I cried from desolation. Can't you understand the loss of the illusion being more lamentable even than the loss of the reality? Come, let us go back," she added, "it is growing dark."

They wandered homewards lingeringly. The summer dusk was full of sweet mystery, of hazy, promising indefinitude; the heath led to the high road, and from thence they came under the darkness of trees, copper-beech and acacia trees, which made a fringed avenue along the back of the Silvers' orchard.

They halted as they reached the wicket. Each longed to express something, but the something was in so many volumes they could not decide whence to light on their quotation. At last she said:--

"I feel you are good and loyal and true. I wish I were worthy you."

He took her hand in his wide palms and smiled.

"Don't flatter me--if flattery it can be called. I question whether saintliness in broadcloth is lovable; but I appreciate the compliment the more for its being undeserved."

"Boy, you are frivolous; if you weren't so good I should not have qualms about----"

"Do you know," he interposed abruptly, "how the Orientals prostrate themselves before their divinity? I would do more."

He flung himself on the ground at her feet, his forehead against the earth, and with a quick touch placed his head beneath her heel.

She uttered a sharp cry and stooped to him--to lift him. Had it been Rosser's, she thought, the act would have loomed magnificent; as it was, the combined self-abas.e.m.e.nt--the devotion, the allegiance of it--was crude and colourless. For her there were no pa.s.sionate illuminations to preserve the margin of the sublime. She had argued love to be but the shadow cast by ourselves, and at that moment her soul's lamp lighted only conceptions that were blurred, formless, and grotesque.

But as he rose he caught her in his arms, and she did not resist them.

She lay inert, like a wounded animal after long strife, and pleaded as though for physical or mental refuge.

"Make me love you! Make me love you!"

And so he kissed her.

It was a kiss that might have awakened a statue to tenderness. The wine of her lips, as he pressed and bruised and crushed them, intoxicated him. He forgot Rosser.

III.

The next day a stone Galatea faced the mirror. There was a purple stain upon her mouth--a tiny swelling that would not disappear. It was scarcely perceptible, but it burnt brand-like on her heart; it glared at, and mocked her, and seemed to beckon with horrible witch-like fingers along the grimy gutters that fringe the paved paths to despair.

Loveless surrender! What more unredeemed debas.e.m.e.nt! Yet she would have vowed her being to lifelong slavery for Gordon Rosser's sake, and held such sacrifice but glorification. One kiss! What was it? Was it gold or was it mud? Mud, mud, mud, which only the magic of love's alchemy could trans.m.u.te to gold and pearl. Yet the mud had served its purpose. Was it not sufficient to defile the temple that had been consecrated to an unworthy idol, break down its altars, obliterate all memory of misguided worship--child-like, unreasoning faiths?

But her revenge--her curse on the falsity had come home to roost. It not only branded her--it seared the innocent! Poor, poor Yate! What had he done that a suffering girl should have clung to him to avert mental death in an ocean of despond, while he had imagined it but a dancing duet on the waves of love? And she had aided the deception. It had been to gain time, to kill regret, to help in wrenching the weeds she had mistaken for flowers from the garden of her life. Well, she had failed, and the travesty must cease. But before it ceased that which she had striven to do as a duty to herself she would now do as a duty to Yate.

She chose paper and a pen with deliberation, and wrote very proportionately and legibly:--

DEAR MR. ROSSER,--Pray do not consider yourself bound to return as you suggested, and resume our childish relations. Your long silence has proved you now know your own mind, and I have already found someone worthy of a woman's esteem and affection.--Your sincere friend,

CAROL SILVER.

She reserved the posting till night, after the coming of Yate, who was due at dinner. In the evening the young man arrived. He had fought his way on foot through a deluge of rain and a thundering blast. The tussle suited his mood, which had rebelled against the suavity of conveyance to his enchanting goal. A handsome colour glowed through the tan of his cheeks, and the sombre green-grey of his eyes shone gallant and golden with the illuminations of love. At first glimpse of him Carol recognised in his personality that almost G.o.dlike quality which welds mere dust into heroes. What devotion he was prepared to give her! A crown of sovereignty to lift the chosen one above princes and peoples, pain and penury, and privation. But the diadem was too large, too ma.s.sive; her poor ign.o.ble head might sink under it. And then princes and peoples would become but a mob, antagonistic or inane, and the pinch of pain, privation, and penury would eternally grip at the strings of her love-famished heart.

She showed him her renouncement of Rosser, and sent it forth to post.

His heart bounded, for her composure deceived him and masked the cost of the decisive action.

After dinner, Mrs Silver, complaining of the elements outside and the leaden temperature within, retired to lie down in the adjacent boudoir.

They were alone. On a distant pedestal a lamp, petalled like a poppy, threw sleepy rays across the room; at the piano some smaller flowers leant their rose blush to the winking candles. She was seated at the keys in a gown, gauzy white, with two dreamy hands expressing some twilight theme of Schumann's--a reverie of sorrow and sighing. He sat pa.s.sive, but it was the pa.s.sivity of the spinning-top. His greedy eyes looked at the wandering fingers and longed to detain them, leant on the mignonette which cast a languid breath from the muslin folds of her bodice--fastened gladly, almost possessively, on the tiny blue speck that marred the outline of her under lip. Poor sweet speck! Oh, that it might there remain for ever as seal royal of the eternity of his truth!

At last she lifted her hands and rose. He rose in sympathy and advanced, half afraid; restrained by the indefinable awe with which we all approach joys that are too delicious to be seized.

For a moment she scanned him earnestly but not regretfully, and, as she gazed, she noted the pa.s.sage of his eyes as they travelled conqueror-wise to the dark flaw on the margin of her mouth. His glance let loose the words that had swelled her heart with pent-up purpose.

She held out her hand. He grasped it eagerly; but there was a stiff wrist and elbow at the back of it which dictated the distance from him to her.

"Yate--Mr Tyndall--I want you to go away!"

"What!--now?--this moment?"

"Yes, and for ever!"

She spoke deliberately, without a quaver of sorrow, and every word on his heart spat like hailstones coming down a chimney on live coal.

His huge frame trembled and swayed an instant. Then he laughed. It was a jarring, joyless convulsion.

"You don't mean it--you are doing it to try me--say you don't, Carol, my darling."

"But I do," she explained. "Listen. I have behaved infamously to you. I will take all the blame. You were so good, so n.o.ble, so loving. You came just when I was dying of heartbreak--people do die of it, no matter what the philosophers say. You saved me, you lifted me to life and womanly pride, you prevented me from writing cringing letters to----in short you saved me from throwing myself at Mr Rosser's head. Nay, don't speak. I told you I had loved him."

"You love him still!" he cried.

"No. I showed you my letter this evening to prove it. But that is no reason for loving you."

"But you'll try and love me? I would make you--you said I might," he murmured, as though coaxing trust from a child.

"No," she said, disengaging her hand and brushing it across her eyes as if to sweep away a blighting memory. "No, it was then I knew myself, then I took courage to face the future without him--without you----"

"But because you refuse him, why----"

"I will not become a thief. Because my own gold has been filched and squandered I should be no less a thief were I to fill my purse with what I can never earn--never repay."

"My love is a free gift, Carol--I don't make reservations," he mumbled, hopelessly, for he knew her tones dictated rather than argued.

"Won't you see that it is because your gift is so lavish, so rare--because I cannot return--I cannot take it? Offerings of real worth cannot be so accepted without degradation. Dear Yate, good-bye. Some day when you have recovered this you will know I am right. Perhaps, even, you may place me, faults and all, in some special heart-niche reserved for defunct yet exotic truths."

She affected flippancy, but her mirth hung lank, like the curls of a drowning man.

He bent over her hand and kissed it.

Then he said thickly, in a drunkard's voice, "I'll go ... by the garden way----" and rushed out.