After
all, we loved, and in my secret dreams had I not always put love first,
as the most sacred? The reality was that I had been afraid of what Mary
would think. True, my attitude had lied to her, but I could not have
avoided that. Decency would have forbidden me to use any other attitude;
and more than decency--kindness. Ought the course of lives to be changed
at the bidding of mere hazard? It was a mere chance that Mary had called
on me. I bled for her grief, but nothing that I could do would assuage
it. I felt sure that, in the impossible case of me being able to state my
position to her and argue in its defence, I could force her to see that
in giving myself to Frank I was not being false to my own ideals. What
else could count? What other consideration should guide the soul on its
mysterious instinctive way? Frank and I had a right to possess each
other. We had a right to be happy if we could. And the one thing that had
robbed us of that right was my lack of courage, caused partly by my
feminine mentality (do we not realize sometimes how ignobly feminine we
are?), and partly by the painful spectacle of Mary's grief.... And her
grief, her most intimate grief, sprang not from thwarted love, but from
a base and narrow conventionality.

Thus I declaimed to myself in my heart, under the influence of the
seductive temptations of that intoxicating atmosphere.

'Come down,' said a voice firmly and quietly underneath me in the
orange-trees of the garden.

I started violently. It was Frank's voice. He was standing in the garden,
his legs apart, and a broad, flat straw hat, which I did not admire, on
his head. His pale face was puckered round about the eyes as he looked up
at me, like the face of a person trying to look directly at the sun.

'Why,' I exclaimed foolishly, glancing down over the edge of the balcony,
and shutting my white parasol with a nervous, hurried movement,
'have--have you come here?'

He had disobeyed my wish. He had not left Mentone at once.

'Come down,' he repeated persuasively, and yet commandingly.

I could feel my heart beating against the marble parapet of the balcony.
I seemed to be caught, to be trapped. I could not argue with him in that
position. I could not leave him shouting in the garden. So I nodded to
pacify him, and disappeared quickly from the balcony, almost scurrying
away. And in the comparative twilight of my room I stopped and gave a
glance in the mirror, and patted my hair,