why, good heavens, it takes time even to start on a journey like
that. You have to book your passage in a ship--and how are you to go
alone?"

"I don't know," said Phyl.

His voice became soft. It was the first time in his life, perhaps, that he
had spoken with tenderness, and the effect was perfectly magical.

"You are not going," he said, "you are not; indeed, I want you far too
much to let you go; there's nothing else I want at all in the world. I
don't count anything worth loving beside you."

No reply.

He turned.

The coloured groom was walking the horses, they were only a few yards
away. He went to the man and gave him some money with the order to return
to Charleston and go back to Grangersons by train, or at least to the
station that was ten miles from Grangerville.

Then as the man went off along the road he stood holding the near horse by
the bridle and talking to Phyl.

"You can't walk back all that way; put your foot on the step and get in,
leave all your trouble right here. I'll see that you never have any
trouble again. Put your foot on the step."

Phyl looked away down the road.

She hesitated just as she had hesitated that morning long ago when she had
run away from school. She had run away, not so much to get home as to get
away from homesickness.

Still she hesitated, urged by the recklessness that prompted her to break
everything at one blow, urged by the dismal and hopeless prospect towards
which the road to Charleston led her mind, held back by all sorts of hands
that seemed reaching to her from the past.

Confused, bewildered, tempted yet resisting, all might have been well had
not a vision suddenly risen before her clear, definite, and destructive to
her reason.

The vision of Frances Rhett.

Everything bad and wild in Phyl surged up before that vision. For a second
it seemed to her that she loathed the man she loved.

She put her foot on the step and got into the phaeton. Silas, without a
word, jumped up beside her, and the horses started.

CHAPTER III

She had committed the irrevocable.

When the contract is signed, when the china vase is broken, all the regret
in the world will not alter the fact.

It was not till they had gone ten miles on their way that the regret came,
sudden and painful as the stab of a dagger.

Miss Pinckney's kindly old face suddenly rose up before Phyl. She would
have been waiting breakfast for her. She saw the breakfast room, sunny and