lted you."

She colored hotly. "That you--what?"

He colored, too. The words were as much a surprise to him as to her. He
had never thought of this view of the case till she herself summoned up
the vision of his friends and enemies discussing the affair in big
leather arm-chairs in big, ponderous rooms in Piccadilly or St. James's
Square. It was what they would say, of course. It was what he himself
would have said of any one else. He had a renewed feeling that retreat
was cut off.

"If we're not married--if I go home without you--it's what'll be on
everybody's lips."

"But it won't be true," she said, with a little gasp.

He laughed. "That won't matter. It's how it'll look."

"Oh, looks!"

"It's what we're talking about, isn't it? It's what makes the
difference. I shall figure as a cad."

He spoke as one who makes an astounding discovery. She was inexpressibly
shocked.

"Oh, but you couldn't," was all she could find to say, but she said it
with conviction.

[Illustration: "THERE'S NO ONE WHO WON'T BELIEVE BUT THAT I--THREW YOU
OVER."]

He laughed again. "You'll see. There's no one--not my best friends--not
my mother--not my sisters--who won't believe--whatever you and I may say
to the contrary--who won't believe but that I--threw you over."

A toss of his hand, a snap of his fingers, suited the action to the
word.

Her color came and went in little shifting flashes. She moved a pace or
two aimlessly, restively. Her head went high, her chin tilted. When she
spoke her voice trembled with indignation, but she only said:

"They couldn't believe it long."

"Oh, couldn't they! The story would follow me to my grave. Things like
that are never forgotten among fellows so intimate as soldiers. There
was a chap in our regiment who jilted a nice girl at the Cape--sailed
for home secretly only a week before the wedding." He paused to let her
take in the dastardly nature of the flight. "Well, he rejoined at the
depot. He stayed--but he didn't stay long. The Rangers got too hot for
him--or too cold. The last I ever heard of him he was giving English
lessons at Boulogne."

The flagrancy of the case gave her an advantage. "It's idle to think
that that kind of fate could overtake you."

"The fate that can overtake me easily enough is that as long as I live
they'll say I chucked a girl because she'd had bad luck."

She was about to reply when the click of the latch of the gate diverted
her attention. Drusilla Fan