scape for
me. Oh, do not think any worse of me now if I tell you that I loved you
then and shall always love you. I wanted to tell you so that day by the
Moon Rock, but I knew that I must not."

"Why not?" His louder voice broke in on her subdued tones impetuously.
"You should not have sent me away, Sisily. That was wrong. It has brought
much misery upon us both."

"It was not wrong!" she replied, with unexpected firmness and a momentary
hardness of glance, which reminded him of her father's look. "It was
because I was nobody--less than that, if what I thought was true. There
was your position to think of. You were to come into the title--my father
told me that before."

"Damn the title!" the young man burst out furiously. "I told you that day
I would have nothing to do with it. Why did you think about that?"

"Because I've heard of nothing else all my life, I suppose," she rejoined
with the ghost of a smile. "I couldn't tell you then that I loved you,
because of it, and other things. Now, it is different. It does not matter
what I say--now." She spoke these words with an underlying note of deep
sadness, and went on: "When you told me that you loved me I saw my duty
plainly. I knew I must go away and hide myself from you, from everybody,
go somewhere where nobody knew me, where I would never be known. But I
wanted to see my father first, to make sure."

"I understand," he muttered in a dull voice.

"I thought it all out on the way to the hotel with my aunt. I determined
to go back and see my father that night. I felt that I could not sleep
until I knew the whole truth. I left the dinner table as soon as I could,
and hurried down to the station to catch the half-past seven wagonette to
St. Fair.

"I got out of the wagonette at the cross-roads, and walked over the moors.
When I reached Flint House I knocked at the door, and Thalassa let me in.
I told him I wanted to see my father, and he said he would wait downstairs
and take me back across the moors when I came down.

"I ran upstairs and knocked at the door of my father's study. He did not
reply, so I opened the door and went in. He was sitting at his table
writing, and when he looked up and saw me he was very angry. 'You,
Sisily!' he said--'what has brought you here at this hour?' I told him I
had come to hear the truth from his own lips. I asked him to tell me
everything. He gave me one of his black looks, but it did not frighten
me--nothing would have frighte