against that
brute Holbury, you momentarily thought of me with contrasting emotion. I
understood that, but I never exaggerated it into anything more
important--or permanent."

"No. You just thought me a frivolous little idiot, and the estimate was
annoyingly correct. I knew that--and yet I hadn't quite realized how
meanly you _did_ think of me--until now."

"But, Marian--!"

"If you thought," she went on, and in the starlight, he could not see
how the color had left even her lips, "if you thought that--even in
those circumstances--even driven by terror of my life--I would have fled
to any other man in the world--" Abruptly she broke off.

Stuart Farquaharson's forgotten pipe had died to ashes. Now it fell with
a tiny crash to the deck. The man leaned forward toward her and his eyes
mirrored an astonishment genuine and absolute.

"Do you mean ... that you really fancied ... that you loved me?"

She turned her face away until he could see only the roundness of her
check's contour and the curling softness of the hair on her neck. Her
voice carried a burden of lethargic weariness. "No, I didn't fancy it
... I knew it ... I've known it ever since."

As Stuart Farquaharson remained silent in the amazement of these
declarations, Marian turned her face again upon him. This time she spoke
with a fiery impetuosity:

"I suppose I should be burning with shame at confessing that ... only
somehow I've never been able to realize why people should blush so at
the truth ... and, as I said a moment ago, since it's over, there's no
reason why I shouldn't tell you, is there?"

"So now--it is over?" He spoke very softly yet with a sense of relief.

Marian's eyes held his own with their remarkably candid gaze, making no
effort to mask their misery. Her finely shaped head carried itself high
as if in disdain for all dissimulation, and once more she went on in a
forced evenness:

"Yes, now it's over, but I'm not through talking. Please don't interrupt
me. I've said too much to let it rest there and I've got to say the rest
in my own fashion." She paused, then went resolutely forward. "You had
spoken to me of Miss Williams, but--you know you were always reticent
about the things you felt deeply--I didn't know enough to thoroughly
understand. In the last year I've done a lot of thinking.... The point
from which I always started was obvious. If you had cared at all about
me, you would have looked me up--when the divorce was ended...