" she said to Jacob. "This, perhaps, is
the strangest of all. I am on my honeymoon."

"Married?" Jacob gasped, throwing off his rugs and sitting upright.
"But I was going to--you were--oh, damn!"

She made a little grimace and drew him to one side.

"I can guess what is in your mind, Mr. Pratt," she said, "and I want
to have a perfectly clear understanding with you. Tell me now, did I
ever give you the slightest encouragement? Did I ever give you the
faintest reason to hope that I should ever, under any circumstances,
be willing to marry you?"

"I can't say that you did," Jacob admitted sadly, gripping at the rail
against which they were standing. "I never left off hoping, though."

"Now that I have become unexpectedly a very happy woman," Sybil went
on, with a new softness in her tone, "I will confess that I was
perhaps unreasonable so far as regards your treatment of my father."

"Thank God for that, anyhow!" Jacob muttered.

"There were times," Sybil went on reflectively, "when I very nearly
admired you."

"For example?"

"When you opened the door of the house in Russell Square for me and
calmly took back your notes which I had been to fetch. That was one
time, at any rate. But I never had the slightest feeling of affection
for you, or the slightest intention of marrying you, however long you
waited. Now I am going to tell you something else, if I may."

"Go on, please," Jacob begged, in a melancholy tone.

"I do not think that you have ever been really in love with me. You
are rather a sentimental person, and you were in love with a girl in a
white gown who walked with you in a rose garden one wonderful evening,
and was very kind to you simply to atone for other people's rudeness.
It wasn't you I was being kind to at all. It was simply a sensitive
guest who had been a little hurt."

"I see," he sighed.

"I had no idea," she went on reflectively, "that you were likely to
misunderstand. It was one of my father's weaknesses that he sometimes
forgot himself and did not sufficiently consider people's feelings.
He was rude to you that night, and I was ashamed and did my best to
atone. I had no idea that you were going to take it all so seriously.
But I want you, Mr. Pratt," she went on earnestly, "to remember this.
It was no real person with whom you walked in the garden that night.
It was no real person the recollection of whom you have chosen to keep
in your heart all this time, and with whom you have fa