--to make you forget."

He extended his hand. "No fear! I haven't forgotten a single one of you
in the world. Some gave me more than money--but I am a beggar now--and
you women always had to get me out of my scrapes."

He swaggered up to the parlour window, and in the dim light filtering
through the blind, looked at the coin lying in his palm. It was a
half-sovereign. He slipped it into his pocket. She stood a little on
one side, with her head drooping, as if wounded; with her arms hanging
passive by her side, as if dead.

"You can't buy me in," he said, "and you can't buy yourself out."

He set his hat firmly with a little tap, and next moment she felt
herself lifted up in the powerful embrace of his arms. Her feet lost the
ground; her head hung back; he showered kisses on her face with a silent
and over-mastering ardour, as if in haste to get at her very soul. He
kissed her pale cheeks, her hard forehead, her heavy eyelids, her faded
lips; and the measured blows and sighs of the rising tide accompanied
the enfolding power of his arms, the overwhelming might of his caresses.
It was as if the sea, breaking down the wall protecting all the homes
of the town, had sent a wave over her head. It passed on; she staggered
backwards, with her shoulders against the wall, exhausted, as if she had
been stranded there after a storm and a shipwreck.

She opened her eyes after awhile; and listening to the firm, leisurely
footsteps going away with their conquest, began to gather her skirts,
staring all the time before her. Suddenly she darted through the open
gate into the dark and deserted street.

"Stop!" she shouted. "Don't go!"

And listening with an attentive poise of the head, she could not tell
whether it was the beat of the swell or his fateful tread that seemed
to fall cruelly upon her heart. Presently every sound grew fainter, as
though she were slowly turning into stone. A fear of this awful silence
came to her--worse than the fear of death. She called upon her ebbing
strength for the final appeal:

"Harry!"

Not even the dying echo of a footstep. Nothing. The thundering of the
surf, the voice of the restless sea itself, seemed stopped. There was
not a sound--no whisper of life, as though she were alone and lost in
that stony country of which she had heard, where madmen go looking for
gold and spurn the find.

Captain Hagberd, inside his dark house, had kept on the alert. A window
ran up; and in the silence of t