s quiet as if it lay
in velvet. Then Claire said suddenly:

"Oh, why did you make me hurt him when I liked him so much?"

They found a bench and sat down under the trees.

"Do you mean you've sent Lionel away?" Winn asked anxiously.

"Yes," she said in a forlorn little voice; "yesterday I sent him away.
He didn't know I was coming over here, he was very miserable. He asked
me if I knew about you--he said he believed you wanted me to--and I
said, 'Of course I know everything.' I wasn't going to let him think you
hadn't told me. Why did you go away?"

He had not thought she would ask him that. It was as if he saw before
him an interminable hill which he had believed himself to have already
climbed.

He drew a deep breath, then he said:

"Didn't they talk about it? I wrote to her, the chaplain's wife I mean;
I hadn't time to see her, but I sent it by the porter. I thought she'd
do; she seemed a gossipy woman, kept on knitting and gassing over a
stove in the hall. I thought she was--a sort of circulating library, you
see. I tipped the porter--tow-headed Swiss brute. I suppose he swallowed
it."

"He went away the same day you did," Claire explained. "Nobody told me
anything. Do you think I would have let them? I wouldn't let Lionel, and
I knew he had a right to, but I didn't care about anybody's rights. You
see, I--I thought you'd tell me yourself. So I came," she finished
quietly.

She waited. Winn began to draw patterns on the snow with his stick, then
he said:

"I've been a bit of a blackguard not telling you myself. I didn't want
to talk about it, and that's a fact. I'm married."

He kept his face turned away from her. It seemed a long time before she
spoke.

"You should have told me that before," she said in a queer, low voice.
"It's too late now."

"Would it," he asked quickly, "have made any difference--about Lionel, I
mean?"

She shook her head.

"Not," she said, "about Lionel."

He bent lower over the pattern in the snow; it had become more
intricate.

"I couldn't tell you," he muttered; "I tried. I couldn't. That was why I
went off. You say too late. D'you mind telling me if you mean--you
care?"

Her silence seemed interminable, and then he knew she had already
answered him. It seemed to him that if he sat there and died, he
couldn't speak.

"Winn," she asked in a whisper, "did you go because of me--or because of
you?"

He turned round, facing her.

"Is that worrying you?" he asked f