they come back?"

"Forget them again."

"And if they will not be forgotten?"

She turned and looked him full in the eyes.

"Die of them," she said; "then they will be forgotten, or----"

"Or what, Beatrice?"

"Here is the station," said Beatrice, "and Betty is quarrelling with the
flyman."

Five minutes more and Geoffrey was gone.

CHAPTER XVI

THE FLAT NEAR THE EDGWARE ROAD

Geoffrey's journey to town was not altogether a cheerful one. To begin
with, Effie wept copiously at parting with her beloved "auntie," as she
called Beatrice, and would not be comforted. The prospect of rejoining
her mother and the voluble Anne had no charms for Effie. They all three
got on best apart. Geoffrey himself had also much to think about, and
found little satisfaction in the thinking. He threw his mind back over
the events of the past few weeks. He remembered how he had first seen
Beatrice's face through the thick mist on the Red Rocks, and how her
beauty had struck him as no beauty ever had before. Then he thought
of the adventure of their shipwreck, and of the desperate courage with
which she had saved his life, almost at the cost of her own. He thought,
too, of that scene when on the following day he had entered the room
where she was asleep, when the wandering ray of light had wavered from
her breast to his own, when that strange presentiment of the ultimate
intermingling of their lives had flashed upon him, and when she had
awakened with an unearthly greeting on her lips. While Effie slowly
sobbed herself to silence in the corner opposite to him, one by one, he
recalled every phase and scene of their ever-growing intimacy, till the
review culminated in his mysterious experience of the past night, and
the memory of Beatrice's parting words.

Of all men Geoffrey was among those least inclined to any sort of
superstition; from boyhood he had been noted for common sense, and
a somewhat disbelieving turn of mind. But he had intellect, and
imagination which is simply intellect etherealised. Without these, with
his peculiar mental constitution, he would, for instance, probably have
been a religious sceptic; having them, he was nothing of the sort. So
in this matter of his experience of the previous night, and generally of
the strange and almost unnatural sympathy in which he found himself
with this lady, common sense and the results of his observation and
experience pointed to the whole thing being nonsense--the resu