told me I should make things worse. He said it would be a crime. And I
tried not to all this winter. But you haunted me. I could not rest, and
in April the desire to see you became a madness. I had to come."

"I think you acted very silly. It isn't as if you could do anything by
coming. I never used to think about you."

"You didn't?" he repeated, agonized.

"Never. Never once," she stabbed. "I'd forgotten you."

"I deserve it."

"Of course you do. You can't mess up a girl's life and then come and say
you're sorry the same as if you'd trod on her toe."

They were walking along involuntarily, and through the mist Jenny's
words of sense, hardened to adamantine sharpness by suffering, cut clear
and cruel and true. She did not like, however, to prosecute the close
encounter in such a profusion of space. She fancied her words were lost
in the great fog, and sought for some familiar outline that should point
the way to Crickabella. Presently a narrow serpentine path gave her the
direction.

"Along here," she said. "I can't talk up here. I feel as if there must
be listeners in this fog. I wish it would get bright."

"It's like my life has been without you," said Maurice.

"Shut up," she stabbed again, "and don't talk silly. Your life's been
quite all right till you took a sudden fancy to see me again."

"Walk carefully," said Maurice humbly. "We're very near the cliff's
edge."

Land and air met in a wreathed obscurity.

"Down here," said Jenny.

They scrambled down into Crickabella, slipping on the pulpy leaves of
withered bluebells, stumbling over clumps of fern and drenching
themselves in the foxgloves, whose woolly leaves held the dripping fog.

"This is where I often used to sit," said Jenny. "Only it's too wet in
the grass now. There's a rock here that's fairly dry, though it does
look rather like a gravestone sticking up out of the ground."

They were now about half-way down the escarpment from the top of which
the rampart of black cliff, sheer on either side of the path, ran up for
twenty feet, so far as could be judged in the deceptive atmosphere.
Jenny leaned against the stone outcrop and faced Maurice.

"Jenny," he began, "when I didn't turn up at Waterloo that first of May,
I must have been mad. I don't want to make excuses, but I must have been
mad."

"Yes, we can all say that, when we've done something we shouldn't have."

"I know it's not an excuse. But I went away in a jangle of nerves. I