o me. It was almost as if we had begun
to be afraid of each other and were hovering on the brink of fatal
revelations.

When dinner was over, the table cleared and the servants gone, I could
bear the strain no longer, so making excuse of a letter I had to write
to the Reverend Mother I sat down at my desk, whereupon Martin lit a
cigar and said he would stroll over the headland.

I heard his footsteps going down the stone stairway from the balcony; I
heard their soft thud on the grass of the lawn; I heard their sharper
crackle on the gravel of the white path, and then they mingled with the
surge and wash of the flowing tide and died away in the distance.

I rose from the desk, and going over to the balcony door looked out into
the darkness. It was a beautiful, pathetic, heart-breaking night. No
moon, but a perfect canopy of stars in a deep blue sky. The fragrance of
unseen flowers--sweetbriar and rose as well as ripening fruit--came up
from the garden. There was no wind either, not even the rustle of a
leaf, and the last bird of evening was silent. All the great orchestra
of nature was still, save for the light churning of the water running in
the glen and the deep organ song of the everlasting sea.

"What can I do?" I asked myself.

Now that Martin was gone I had begun to understand him. His silence had
betrayed his heart to me even more than his speech could have done.
Towering above him like a frowning mountain was the fact that I was a
married woman and he was trying to stand erect in his honour as a man.

"He must be suffering too," I told myself.

That was a new thought to me and it cut me to the quick.

When it came to me first I wanted to run after him and throw myself into
his arms, and then I wanted to run away from him altogether.

I felt as if I were on the brink of two madnesses--the madness of
breaking my marriage vows and the madness of breaking the heart of the
man who loved me.

"Oh, what can I do?" I asked myself again.

I wanted him to go; I wanted him to stay; I did not know what I wanted.
At length I remembered that in ordinary course he would be going in two
days more, and I said to myself:

"Surely I can hold out that long."

But when I put this thought to my breast, thinking it would comfort me,
I found that it burnt like hot iron.

Only two days, and then he would be gone, lost to me perhaps for ever.
Did my renunciation require that? It was terrible!

There was a piano in the r