s
frightened in the dark.

. . . Half an hour later found them still together, standing with
linked hands. In Rooke's eyes there was a quiet light of triumph,
while Nan's attitude betrayed a kind of hesitancy, as of one driven
along strange and unknown ways.

"Then you'll come, Nan, you'll come?" he said eagerly.

"I'll come," she answered dully. "I can't bear my life any longer."

"I'll make you happy. . . . I swear it!"

"Will you, Maryon?" She shook her head and the eyes she raised to his
were full of a dumb, hopeless misery. "I don't think anything could
ever make me--happy. But I'd have gone on . . . I'd have borne
it . . . if Uncle David were still here. What we are going to do would
have hurt him so"--and her voice trembled. "But he's gone, and now
nothing seems to matter very much."

A sudden overwhelming tenderness for this pain-racked, desolate spirit
surged up in Maryon's heart.

"You poor little child!" he murmured. "You poor child!"

And gathering her into his arms he held her closely, leaning his cheek
against her hair, with no passion, but with a swift, understanding
sympathy that sprang from the best that was in the man.

She clung to him forlornly, so tired and hopeless she no longer felt
any impulse to resist him. She had tried--tried to withstand him and
to go on treading the uphill path that lay before her. But now she had
come to the end of her strength. She would go away with Maryon . . .
go out of it all . . . and somewhere, perhaps, together they would
build up a new and happier life.

Dimly at the back of her mind floated the memory of Peter's words:

"But there's honour, dear, and duty . . ."

She crushed down the remembrance resolutely. If she were going away
into a new world with Maryon, the door of memory must be closed fast.

CHAPTER XXXII

THE GREEN CAR

The atmosphere still held the chill of early morning as Sandy emerged,
vigorous and glowing and amazingly hungry, from his daily swim in the
sea. He dressed quickly in a small tent erected on the shore and then,
whistling cheerfully and with his towel slung over his shoulders, took
his way up the beach to where his bicycle stood propped against a
boulder.

A few minutes' pedalling brought him into St. Wennys, where he
dismounted to buy a packet of "gaspers" dispensed by the village
postmistress.

It was a quaint little village, typical of the West Country, with its
double row of small houses c