, the Flamborough
lights swung out across the sea: white--white--red. How unhappy life
was! And contempt did not kill love, as she had always understood from
the novels in the pretty paper covers which she liked to read so much.
It had killed trust; but the ache in her went on just the same, even
though Godfrey had been threatened by Uncle Creddle with a big stick,
and had shown such a cowardly anxiety to escape a row.

She drew in deep breaths of the salt air--cold, invigorating as it
always was here after sunset on the warmest days; and all her mind was
bent on despising him as he deserved. She tried to put her contempt
into words, so as to make it more real. "He's no good. I'm well rid
of him. I wouldn't have anything to do with him now, not if he were to
crawl after me on his hands and knees from here to Flamborough."

But the silence of the evening gave back an answer which she was
obliged to hear in her heart; and she told herself, though with less
certainty: "I _won't_ care; I _will_ end by not caring. He's not worth
it."

But at last she did manage to flick the raw place until she was really
bitter against him. For the sudden thought came to her that he dare
not have behaved to a girl of his own sort in the same way as he had
done to her. It was because he looked down on her that he could do it.

Then she saw the two girls coming her way down the road again, and
hurried up the side street in order to escape them. But they followed,
evidently going to the promenade, so she turned down to the shore where
she was certain of being alone at this season and this hour. As she
went along, a most vivid sense of this waste of her youth's bright
happiness came across her. "I _will_ forget him! I aren't _going_ to
be made miserable just by falling in love," she said to herself, half
sobbing--a little figure running along through the twilight by the edge
of the sea like a leaf driven by the wind, flinging defiance at the god
of love whom no change can displace.

_Chapter XXII_

_Morning_

It was two days later, and Caroline was going down to cash a cheque for
Mrs. Bradford. There had been a slight touch of frost in the night,
and the atmosphere was so rarified this morning that every object
seemed to meet the eye with equal distinctness--with the effect,
somehow, of a Dutch painting. A little black dog jumping up excitedly
outside the fishmonger's, a woman in the doorway of the little toy-shop
t