cy of her eyes.
Then she smiled again, dismissing her thought with a little laugh
which broke off abruptly.

"One so soon forgets!" the other added, with an intention in her
voice, an involuntary betrayal which she almost immediately
regretted.

"Forgets!"

Eve caught up the word eagerly, almost passionately, her voice
falling into a lower key.

"Forget! Forgive and forget!" repeated Mary quickly and recklessly,
letting her eyes wander from her own clasped hands to Eve's bouquet
of delicate, scentless fritillaries, which lay neglected where it
had fallen on the floor between their feet. "How easy it sounds!--is
perhaps--and yet--I have not so much to forget--or to be forgiven!"

The last words were almost whispered, but for Eve's imagination,
poised on tiptoe like a hunted creature blindly listening for the
approach of the Pursuer, they were full of suggestion, of
denunciation.

She remembered now, with a swiftly banished pang of jealousy, that
this girl had loved him.

Her thought sped back to a summer evening nearly a year ago, when it
had seemed to her that she had surprised her friend's secret.

"What do you mean, Mary?" she demanded courageously. "What have I to
be forgiven? Don't despise me; don't, for Heaven's sake, don't play
with me! I am all in the dark! Are you accusing me? Do you think
because I say nothing that I have forgotten--that I can forget? Is
it something about--him?"

Mary cast a rapid glance at her.

"Are you afraid of his name, then?"

Eve dropped her hands despairingly.

"Ah, you do! You _are_ playing with me! About Philip Rainham, then!
For Heaven's sake speak! Do you know what I only guess--that he was
innocent? For God's sake say it!"

It was Mary's turn to look bewildered, to feel penitent. She began
to recognise that there were greater depths in Eve's nature than she
had suspected, that her indifference might, after all, prove to have
been merely a mask.

"You guess--innocent--don't you know, then?"

"Nothing, nothing! I only suspect--believe! I have been groping
alone in the darkness--and yet I _do_ know! He was innocent--he played
a part?"

"Yes," said Mary gently; "he sacrificed himself, for another!"

"He sacrificed himself--for me. Ah, say it! say it!"

Mary was greatly puzzled and at the same time moved--filled with a
supreme compassion for this woman who was yet such a child, so
dainty and frail a thing to confront the deadly knowledge that she
had made a s