re near by and did she hear
without the slightest premonition his chance and fateful footsteps on
the flagged path leading to the cottage door? In the shadow of the
night made more cruelly sombre for her by the very shadow of death he
must have appeared too strange, too remote, too unknown to impress
himself on her thought as a living force--such a force as a man can
bring to bear on a woman's destiny.

She glanced towards the hotel door again; I followed suit and then our
eyes met once more, this time intentionally. A tentative, uncertain
intimacy was springing up between us two. She said simply: "You are
waiting for Mr Fyne to come out; are you?"

I admitted to her that I was waiting to see Mr Fyne come out. That was
all. I had nothing to say to him.

"I have said yesterday all I had to say to him," I added meaningly. "I
have said it to them both, in fact. I have also heard all they had to
say."

"About me?" she murmured.

"Yes. The conversation was about you."

"I wonder if they told you everything."

If she wondered I could do nothing else but wonder too. But I did not
tell her that. I only smiled. The material point was that Captain
Anthony should be told everything. But as to that I was very certain
that the good sister would see to it. Was there anything more to
disclose--some other misery, some other deception of which that girl had
been a victim? It seemed hardly probable. It was not even easy to
imagine. What struck me most was her--I suppose I must call it--
composure. One could not tell whether she understood what she had done.
One wondered. She was not so much unreadable as blank; and I did not
know whether to admire her for it or dismiss her from my thoughts as a
passive butt of ferocious misfortune.

Looking back at the occasion when we first got on speaking terms on the
road by the quarry, I had to admit that she presented some points of a
problematic appearance. I don't know why I imagined Captain Anthony as
the sort of man who would not be likely to take the initiative; not
perhaps from indifference but from that peculiar timidity before women
which often enough is found in conjunction with chivalrous instincts,
with a great need for affection and great stability of feelings. Such
men are easily moved. At the least encouragement they go forward with
the eagerness, with the recklessness of starvation. This accounted for
the suddenness of the affair. No! With all her ine