behind my
back.'

'You may bet your life on that. Joan hasn't said anything about
whatever love-affairs you may have had.'

'Every girl has had love-affairs. I'm no exception to the rule. There's
been no real harm in them. Let them lie--buried in oblivion. They're
not worth resurrecting.'

'No, but,'--he persisted--thinking all the while of that
letter--'Bridget, I must ask you this one thing. Is there any man in
the world you care for more than you care for me? I know,' he added
sadly, 'that you don't love in the way I love you--in the way I'd like
to be loved by you. I know that's too much to expect--yet.'

The melancholy note in his speech touched her.

'I told you that I do WANT to love you, Colin--only I can't help being
what I am,' she said softly. She looked up at him in the pale
brightness of the thin moon and myriad stars. He stood with the faint
illumination from the open windows of Government House upon his fine
head and his neat fair beard. It intensified the gleam in his earnest
blue eyes, while it softened his angularities and bush roughness, and
as she looked up at him, she could not help feeling what a splendid
fellow he was! What a MAN! So much finer than that other man to whom
she had nearly given herself! Ah, she had had an escape! Under all his
show of romantic adventure, his ardent protestations, his magnetic
charm, that other man had been utterly sophisticated, worldly,
self-interested. He had shown this in his money-grabbing, in his
disloyalty both to the woman he had professed to love, and to the woman
he had married for her fortune. Thinking of him in this way, Lady
Bridget felt that in time she might come to care a great deal more for
Colin McKeith.

He caught up her last words.

'Yes, I know that you WANT to love me Biddy, and I hope with all my
heart and soul that you will--or else--' he broke off, his face
darkening.

'Or else--what?'

'I don't know. It would be hell. I can't think such a thing at this
moment. If it comes--well, I'll face it as I've had to face other ugly
things. Don't let us speak of the possibility!'

She sensed some quality in him that she had not realised before.

'You frighten me a little, Colin. It's as if I may any day come up
before something I wasn't prepared for; and yet--I rather like it.'

He smiled at her.

'I'm glad you like it, anyway. You seem to me such a child, Biddy,
though you are always telling me you are such an old soul. I can't for