said it."

"She tells me that she doesn't care for me any more." He took a book
from the table beside him, and looked absently at its title. "We must
allow that she has a great facility as regards change."

"She has a great honesty."

Winthrop sat down--until now he had been standing; he threw aside the
book. "You certainly can't approve of it," he said,--"such a
disposition?"

He did not pay much heed to what he was saying, he was absorbed in the
problem before him; face to face with Margaret, he was asking himself,
and with more inward tumult than ever, why she had been so willing to
have him think of her, as, after what he had seen, he must think? During
his two weeks of absence--the evening before on that long pier in the
rain--he had felt a hot anger against her for the unconcern with which
she was treating him. But now that he knew the real history of that last
afternoon, now that he knew that it was Garda who had planned the
meeting with Lucian, Garda, not Margaret, who had been on her way to
that solitary house, the problem was more strangely haunting even than
before. She had saved Garda from compromising herself in the eyes of the
man to whom she was engaged--yes; but she had done it at the expense of
compromising herself, Garda, meanwhile, remaining ignorant of the
greatness of the sacrifice, since she did not know, as Margaret did,
that he, Winthrop, was sitting there in the wood beyond the bend.

Certainly it was an immense thing for one woman to have done for
another; you might say, indeed, that there was nothing greater that a
woman could do.

Then came again the galling thought that Margaret had not found the task
so difficult, simply because she was indifferent as to what his opinion
of her might be; _she_ knew that she had not been in any sense of the
word to blame--that was enough for her; what he knew, or thought he
knew, troubled her little.

But no, that could not be. Margaret Harold was a proud woman--you could
see that, quiet as she was, in every delicate line of her face; it was
not natural, therefore, that she should willingly rest in the eyes of
any one under such an imputation as that. Surely, now that Garda had, of
her own accord, broken off her engagement, and confessed (only Garda
never "confessed," she merely told) that her old liking for Lucian had
risen again, surely _now_ Margaret would throw off the false character
that rested upon her, would hasten to do so, would be glad to