it."

"Courage!" exclaimed the young girl in high scorn. "He was a brute and a
coward!"

"Dear me!" laughed Brook. "Don't you admit that a man may ever make a
mistake?"

"When a man makes a mistake of that sort, he should either cut his
throat, or else keep his word to the woman and try to make her happy."

"That's a violent view--really! It seems to me that when a man has made
a mistake the best thing to do is to go and say so. The bigger the
mistake, the harder it is to acknowledge it, and the more courage it
needs. Don't you think so, Mrs. Bowring?"

"The mistake of all mistakes is a mistake in marriage," said the elder
woman, looking away. "There is no remedy for that, but death."

"Yes," answered Clare. "But don't you think that I'm right? It's what
you say, after all--"

"Not exactly, my dear. No man who doesn't love a woman can make her
happy for long."

"Well--a man who makes a woman think that he loves her, and then leaves
her for some one else, is a brute, and a beast, and a coward, and a
wretch, and a villain--and I hate him, and so do all women!"

"That's categorical!" observed Brook, with a laugh. "But I dare say you
are quite right in theory, only practice is so awfully different, you
know. And a woman doesn't thank a man for pretending to love her."

Clare's eyes flashed almost savagely, and her lip curled in scorn.

"There's only one right," she said. "I don't know how many wrongs there
are--and I don't want to know!"

"No," answered Brook, gravely enough. "And there is no reason why you
ever should."

CHAPTER VII

"You seemed to be most tremendously in earnest yesterday, when we were
talking about that book," observed Brook on the following afternoon.

"Of course I was," answered Clare. "I said just what I thought."

They were walking together along the high road which leads from Amalfi
towards Salerno. It is certainly one of the most beautiful roads in
Europe, and in the whole world. The chain of rocky heights dashes with
wild abruptness from its five thousand feet straight to the dark-blue
sea, bristling with sharp needles and spikes of stone, rough with a
chaos of brown boulders, cracked from peak to foot with deep torn
gorges. In each gorge nestles a garden of orange and lemons and
pomegranates, and out of the stones there blows a perfume of southern
blossom through all the month of May. The sea lies dark and clear below,
ever tideless, often still as a woodland pool; th