won't you?" he asked. "I think I'll go
for a tramp."

She said nothing, but her eyes were questioning, and the man answered
their interrogation almost gruffly.

"We've got to walk close to the edge," he said with the quiet of
restrained passion. "You trust me, you say, and even before you said it
I read it in your eyes. I want that same trust to be in them
to-morrow.... I don't know how you feel, but I'm like the reforming
drunkard--tortured by his thirst." He paused, then added, "I think it's
just as well to walk off my restiveness if I can."

It was five o'clock when he returned, hot and weary from fast tramping
in the blistering heat, but when he presented himself, as dusty as a
miller to Conscience, who received him among the flowers of her garden,
the woman recognized, from his face and the smile of self-victory in his
eyes, that he had come back a dependable ally and not a dangerous enemy.
In his voice as he hailed her was the old ring of comradeship--and it
was almost cheerful. "Hurry into your bathing suit," he invited tersely.
"The water is bluer than water ever was before."

Her eyes met his dubiously. She had not, like himself, burned out her
wretchedness of spirit in muscular fatigue.

"I feel rather tired, Stuart," she demurred. But he answered
decisively, "That's exactly why you need a plunge. You'll go in the
tired housekeeper and come out Aphrodite rising from the foam."

"To-morrow perhaps--" she began, but he shook his head.

"If I'm any judge of weather the furies are brewing something in the
line of a tempest. To-morrow will probably be a day of storm."

Under his forced lightness of speech, she realized the tenderness of
solicitude--and acquiesced, because he wished it.

From her window as she changed into bathing things she saw the cove,
blue as the Bay of Naples. After to-morrow, she thought, she would hate
that cove. After to-morrow she must begin making her life over, and it
would be like poverty's task of turning thread-bare seams.

In a little while Stuart, waiting for her in the hall below, heard, as
he had heard on the day of his arrival, a laugh at the stairhead and
looked up to see her there, standing once more in the attitude of one
about to dive.

Her bare arms were raised and her dark hair fell heavily about her face,
for she had not yet gathered and bound it under her bathing cap.

Through the emptiness of after years, he knew that picture would haunt
him with the ache