ompany," she answered with a
wan smile. "People like me always have to be a good deal alone, anyway.
I shall be, of course, lonelier, now that I have no one to play with,"
and the smile vanished from her lips. She flung up her face towards the
skies, letting her grief have its way upon that empty deck.

"So we shall never be together--just you and I--alone again," she said,
forcing herself to realise that unintelligible thing. Her thoughts ran
back over the year--the year of their alliance--and she saw all of its
events flickering vividly before her, as they say drowning people do.
"Oh, Wub, what a cruel mistake you made when you went out of your way to
be kind," she cried, with the tears streaming down her face; and
Luttrell winced.

"Yes, that's true," he admitted remorsefully. "I never dreamed what
would come of it."

"You should have left me alone."

Amongst the flickering pictures of the year the first was the clearest.
A great railway station in the West of England, a train drawn up at the
departure platform, herself with a veil drawn close over her face, half
running, half walking in a pitiful anguish towards the train; and then a
man at her elbow. Harry Luttrell.

"I have reserved a compartment. I suspected that things were not going
to turn out well. I thought the long journey to London alone would be
terrible. If things had turned out right, you would not have seen me."

She had let him place her in a carriage, look after her wants as if she
had been a child, hold her in his arms, tend her with the magnificent
sympathy of his silence. That had been the real beginning. Stella had
known him as the merest of friends before. She had met him here and
there at a supper party, at a dancing club, at some Bohemian country
house; and then suddenly he had guessed what others had not, and
foolishly had gone out of his way to be kind.

"She would have died if I hadn't travelled with her," Luttrell argued
silently. "She would have thrown herself out of the carriage, or when
she reached home she would have----" and his argument stopped, and he
glanced at her uneasily.

Undisciplined, was the epithet she had used of herself. You never knew
what crazy thing she might do. There was daintiness but no order in her
life; the only law she knew was given to her by a fastidious taste.

"Of course, Wub, I have always known that you never cared for me as I do
for you. So it was bound to end some time." She caught his hand to