you, Fay,
and to ask you to forgive me for misjudging you. You see I was not aware
you--had thought of it."

"It's for you to forgive me, Michael, not me you. And you don't bear me
a grudge, do you? I somehow don't feel as if you did. And--oh, Michael,
you never, never will say anything or do anything, will you--you
_could_, you know--to stop my marrying Wentworth?"

Michael's eyes turned on her almost with scorn.

"When first we met again, that second time in Italy," he said gently,
"do you remember it by the tomb in the gardens? There were roses all
over it. I never saw such roses. Perhaps there were none like them. Then
I had no faintest thought or hope of marrying you, though I had not
forgotten you, Fay. I had put it all away, buried it. You were another
man's wife. Now that we meet again--_the position is the same_."

Fay looked at Michael.

The impersonal detached look which she had set herself to extinguish
that day amid the roses, which had been in his face when she saw him
first as a lad, which she had _twice_ extinguished, was in his eyes
again. There was no pain in them now, any more than there had been when
they leaned together beside the tomb: only the shadow of something
exceeding sharp, endured, accepted, outlived. Michael looked through
her, beyond her.

"And yet the position is not quite the same," he said tranquilly, "for
then you were married to a man you did not love, and now you are to
marry a man you--Oh! Fay, you _do_ care for Wentworth, don't you?"

"I would not have kept _him_ in prison for a day," she said, and hid her
face in her hands.

If only it might have been Wentworth who had sacrificed himself for her
with what desperate rapidity she would have rescued him. How calm her
agonised heart would be now. Fay was beginning to learn that it is ill
to take a service save from the hand we love. And perhaps, too, in her
heart she knew that Wentworth would never have sacrificed himself for
her, for Michael possibly, but not for her.

"Wentworth is worth caring for," said Michael. "Not worth caring for in
part, a bit here and a bit there, who is? but worth caring for
_altogether_. I have loved him all my life. I love him more than anyone
in the world. You asked me just now not to say anything to stop his
marrying you. But that is just what I've come about. I am so afraid of
his marriage with you being stopped."

Fay raised her face out of her hands, and stared at him.

"It's the only