She had let him be drawn close to her again. He put his hands on her shoulders and looked with all his pa.s.sion into her eyes.

"That's the first time you've said you loved," he whispered. "Do you know what it sounded like to me?"

She shook her head.

"Like an organ playing in an empty church. My G.o.d! You're wonderful."

Then she had let him kiss her again; again, herself, being the one to draw away when emotion rose to stifling in her throat. Again was he obedient to her wishes.

They had arranged to meet the next morning on the cliffs. Liddiard had promised he would bring lunch.

"They'll think we're up at the Golf dub," he had said, for already in their minds had appeared that urgency for deception which should secure for them the certainty of their meeting.

But the next morning, after her conversation with Jane, Mary dispatched a note to Liddiard at the White Hart Hotel.

He tore it open with fingers that had dread in them.

"Meet me on the beach at 11.30," she had written, "near the bathing tents. Don't bother about lunch."

With a sudden chill it struck him. It was all over. The night had brought her calmer thoughts. Emotion was steadied in her now. She was not going to trust herself alone with him again. It was all finished.

On an impulse he took a piece of paper and wrote on it--

"Have been called back to Somerset this morning; so sorry I shall have no opportunity to say good-by."

When he had written, he stared at it, reading it again and again.

Was not this the best? It was too wonderful to be true; too wonderful to last. He knew himself well enough to realize that any prolonged deception with his wife would be impossible. He had the honesty of his emotions; the courage of his thoughts. He could not practice deception with any ease. Wonderful as it was, could any wonder compensate for the utter wrecking of his home? It was not as though in the wonder that had come to her, she refused to recognize his wife. That was what brought him such amaze of her. Any other woman he would have expected to be jealous, exacting, cruel. She appeared to be none of these.

What, in the name of G.o.d, was it she wanted? The sudden wish to understand, the sudden curiosity to find out communicated with the energy in his fingers. He tore up the note he had written and flung the pieces away, sending back the messenger without a reply.

It was playing with life, a sport that in other men earned for them his deepest contempt. It was playing with life, yet the call to it was greater than he could or cared to resist.

At half-past eleven, he went down to the beach where all the inhabitants of Bridnorth sat and whiled away their time till the midday meal, and there he found her, dressed with more care and more effect than she had ever been before. She was lying down under the warm shade of a brilliantly colored parasol and, as he approached her, it seemed to him that there was a deeper beauty in her then than in any other woman in the world.

"Why this?" he said as he sat down. "Here of all places? Do you know very nearly I didn't come?"

"Yes, I was afraid of that," she replied. "Afraid for a moment. Not really afraid. But I couldn't explain in my note."

"What is it then?"

"We were seen yesterday."

"Who by?"

"My sister--Jane."

"Seen where?"

"By that gate in the bracken."

He screwed up his mouth and bit at a piece of loose skin on his lip.

"What's she going to do?" he asked.

"Nothing. What can she do? No one must know if we meet again--that's all. We must be more careful."

He stared at her in bewildered astonishment.

"I don't understand you," he muttered. "Sometimes you seem like adamant when your voice is softest of all."

She looked at him and with her eyes told him that she loved him and with a little odd twist of her lips, which scarcely she herself knew of, she kissed his lips and at that distance at which he sat from her, he felt the kiss like a leaf falling with a flutter to the ground.

"What do you mean--we must be more careful?" he said thickly. "What do you mean by that? How can we be more careful? Where else could we hope to be more alone than on those cliffs--unless--unless--" His breath clung in his throat. He swallowed it back and went on in a hoa.r.s.e voice--"Unless it were the time we went there."

"What time?" she asked.

"Night," said he. "Midnight and all the hours of early morning."

She lay back on her cushion beneath the warm shadow of her parasol and closed her eyes, saying nothing while he sat staring at the curved line of her throat.

IX

It was no difficult matter to rise unheard at midnight in her room, unheard to creep quietly downstairs, to open and close the kitchen door into the yard. Having accomplished that, it was but a few steps to the door through the wall into the road.

Now that she slept alone in that room at the back of the house, Mary had no fear of discovery. Nevertheless her heart was beating, an even but heavy throb, nor settling to the normal pulse, even when she found herself out in the lane and turning towards the path across the marshes by the mouth of the River Watchett that leads a solitary way to Penlock Head.

She questioned herself in nothing that she did. Her mind was made. It was no moment for questioning. All questions such as there had been, and doubtless there were many, she had answered. It was no habit of hers to look back over her shoulder. She fixed her destination with firm resolve, and, once the fear of immediate discovery was left behind, she walked with a firm stride. Imagination played no havoc with her nerves.

Already her heart was in their meeting place.

A restive heart it was, all bounding at sudden visions, leaping, shying; at moments in riot almost at thought of lying in his arms. Sometimes even there was fear, a fear, not of the thing she would fly; not a fear that made the heart craven. Rather it was a fear that steeled her courage to face whatever might befall.

Some sense undoubted she had of the mad riot of pa.s.sion, that it could terrify, that it was frightening like sudden thunder bursting. But just as she would lie still in her bed at home through the fiercest storm, so now she knew, however deep her fear, that she would not complain.

She walked that way through the marshes to their meeting place at the foot of Penlock Hill like one, firm in her step, who went to a glorious death. Death was terrible, but in all the meaning it had, she felt no fear of it.

In such manner as this did Mary Throgmorton go to the confirmation of her faith in Life, and behind her, in the square, white house, she left one to the bitterest of its realizations.

f.a.n.n.y could not sleep that night. Near midnight, she lit a candle and began to read. But no reading could still the unsettled temper of her mind. Again and again her eyes lifted from the printed page, seeking corners of the room where, in that candlelight, the shadows gathered, harbor for the vague wandering of her thoughts.

Long after midnight, in the communicating silence which falls about a sleeping house, she heard a sound and sat up in bed. Some one had opened and shut the gate into the lane. She got up and went to the window. If any one pa.s.sed into the road in front of the house, she must see them. No one came. All was silence again.