should love me?" she
thought; but none the less for that her heart clamored for Sunlocks.
Sunlocks, Sunlocks, always Sunlocks--the Sunlocks of her childhood,
her girlhood, her first womanhood--Sunlocks of the bright eyes and
the smile like sunshine.

And thinking again of Jason, and his brave ways, and his simple,
manly bearing, and his plain speech so strangely lifted out of itself
that day into words with wings, she only told herself that she was
about to break his heart, and that to see herself do it it would go
far to break her own. So she decided that she would write to him, and
then slip away as best she could, seeing him no more.

At that resolve she sat and wrote four pages of pleading and prayer
and explanation. But having finished her letter, it smote her
suddenly, as she folded and sealed it, that it would be a selfish
thing to steal away without warning, and leave this poor paper behind
her to crush Jason, for though written in pity for him, in truth it
was fraught with pity only for herself. As mean of soul as that she
could not be, and straightway she threw her letter aside, resolved
to tell her story face to face. Then she remembered the night of
Stephen Orry's death, and the white lips of Jason as he stood above
the dying man--his father whom he had crossed the seas to slay--and,
again, by a quick recoil, she recalled his laughter of that morning,
and she said within herself, "If I tell him, he will kill me."

But that thought decided her, and she concluded that tell him she
must, let happen what would. So partly in the strength of her
resolve, and partly out of its womanly weakness, and the fear that
she might return to her first plan at last, she took up her own
letter to Jason, and locked it in a chest. Then taking from the folds
at her breast the letter of Sunlocks to herself, she read it again,
and yet again, for it was the only love letter she had ever received,
and there was a dear delight in the very touch of it. But the thought
of that sensuous joy smote her conscience when she remembered what
she had still to do, and thinking that she could never speak to Jason
eye to eye, with the letter of Sunlocks lying warm in her bosom, she
took it out, and locked it also in the chest.

Jason came back at sundown to fetch her away that they might make
some innocent sport together because his mill was roofed. Then with
her eyes on her feet she spoke, and he listened in a dull, impassive
silence, while