miled. "Well, that should recommend you for promotion," she said
happily. "I am sure you will decide not to enforce the order, if you
think about it. You shall be promoted, your honour, to a better place,"
she repeated, half-satirically.

"Shall I then?" he asked with a warm smile and drawing close to her.
"Shall I? Then it can only be by your recommendation. Ah, my dear,
my beautiful dear one," he hastened to add, "my life is possible
henceforward only through you. You have taught me by your life and
person, by your beauty and truth, by your nobility of mind and character
how life should be lived. I have not always deserved your good opinion
nor that of others. I have fought duels and killed men; I have aspired
to place; I have connived at appointment; I have been vain, overbearing
and insistent on my rights or privileges; I have played the dictator
here in Jamaica; I have not been satisfied save to get my own way; but
you have altered all that. Your coming here has given me a new outlook.
Sheila, you have changed me, and you can change me infinitely more. I
who have been a master wish to become your slave. I want you--beloved, I
want you for my wife."

He reached out as though to take her hand, but she drew back from him.
His thrilling words had touched her, as she had seldom been touched, as
she had never been touched by any one save the man that must never be
hers; she was submerged for the moment in the flood of his eloquence,
and his yielding to her on the point of Dyck's imprisonment gave fresh
accent to his words. Yet she could not, she dared not yet say yes to his
demand.

"My lord," she said, "oh, you have stirred me! Yet I dare not reply to
you as you wish. Life is hard as it is, and you have suddenly made it
harder. What is more, I do not, I cannot, believe you. You have loved
many. Your life has been a covert menace. Oh, I know what they said
of you in Ireland. I know not of your life here. I suppose it is
circumspect now; but in Ireland it was declared you were notorious with
women."

"It is a lie," he answered. "I was not notorious. I was no better and no
worse than many another man. I played, I danced attendance, I said soft
nothings, but I was tied to no woman in all Ireland. I was frolicsome
and adventurous, but no more. There is no woman who can say I used her
ill or took from her what I did not--"

"Atone for, Lord Mallow?"

"Atone--no. What I did not give return for, was what I was going to