readth escapes; for those few
seconds, heavenly in themselves, he only remembered her--his wife--her
beauty and her tender appeal to him.

She would have pleaded again, for she felt that she was winning in this
fight: her instinct--that unerring instinct of the woman who loves and
feels herself beloved--told her that for the space of an infinitesimal
fraction of time, his iron will was inclined to bend; but he checked her
pleading with a kiss.

Then there came a change.

Like a gigantic wave carried inwards by the tide, his turbulent emotion
seemed suddenly to shatter itself against a rock of self-control. Was
it a call from the boatmen below? a distant scrunching of feet upon the
gravel?--who knows, perhaps only a sigh in the midnight air, a ghostly
summons from the land of dreams that recalled him to himself.

Even as Marguerite was still clinging to him, with the ardent fervour of
her own passion, she felt the rigid tension of his arms relax, the power
of his embrace weaken, the wild love-light become dim in his eyes.

He kissed her fondly, tenderly, and with infinite gentleness smoothed
away the little damp curls from her brow. There was a wistfulness now in
his caress, and in his kiss there was the finality of a long farewell.

"'Tis time I went," he said, "or we shall miss the tide."

These were the first coherent words he had spoken since first she
had met him here in this lonely part of the garden, and his voice
was perfectly steady, conventional and cold. An icy pang shot through
Marguerite's heart. It was as if she had been abruptly wakened from a
beautiful dream.

"You are not going, Percy!" she murmured, and her own voice now sounded
hollow and forced. "Oh! if you loved me you would not go!"

"If I love you!"

Nay! in this at least there was no dream! no coldness in his voice when
he repeated those words with such a sigh of tenderness, such a world of
longing, that the bitterness of her great pain vanished, giving place to
tears. He took her hand in his. The passion was momentarily conquered,
forced within his innermost soul, by his own alter ego, that second
personality in him, the cold-blooded and coolly-calculating adventurer
who juggled with his life and tossed it recklessly upon the sea of
chance 'twixt a doggerel and a smile. But the tender love lingered on,
fighting the enemy a while longer, the wistful desire was there for her
kiss, the tired longing for the exquisite repose of her embrace