"No," he said. "After all, you have a right to
know that you had nothing to do with it. Nothing. She had never heard
a word about you and me until I told her myself; and that was after our
engagement was broken off."

"Then why did you----?" She paused, so filled with all sorts of
conflicting desires and emotions--longing to know, and yet passionately
telling herself it didn't matter to her--that she had lost all
certainty in herself, and her voice came sharp and tremulous.

"She simply threw me over," he said at last. "Found out she didn't
like the idea of married life, though she was very fond of me. I
suppose there are women like that in every civilized community. No
doubt if she were a Roman Catholic she would be a nun, and she would be
a good one. She's good all through. I realize that, in spite of what
has happened."

Caroline looked at him as he faced the sea in the strong light--at his
heavy features, his broadly set figure, his whole air of knowledge and
virility and strength. Then the words fluttered up into her throat
without any volition of her own: "Oh, you well may think her good! You
well may!"

For in that moment she guessed what Laura had come to tell her but had
not been able to say after all. That heavenly kindness of Laura's was
actually deep enough and real enough to make her spare her lover the
knowledge of how he had wounded her. It was clear enough that she--who
always seemed so easy and simple--had detected the first little change
in him when he became attracted to Caroline. So she had put off her
wedding to make sure, and she had become sure.

Caroline opened her lips to say with passion: "Can't you _see_ what she
did it for?" But before the words left her lips, there came into her
mind a memory of Laura's face as it looked when she left the door of
the Cottage, which was so vivid as to be almost an illusion. Now she
knew what the anxious, uncertain gaze of those brown eyes into her own
had really meant.

Laura had been trying to say all the time: "Don't tell him! don't tell
him!" But the complexities involved had been too great, when it came
to the point, for anything to be actually said.

Caroline waited to get back her self-command, stirred by a sudden
loyalty to her own sex which made her long to pierce his masculine
obtuseness--to show him what Laura had sacrificed and what he had
missed. And as he watched her, he wondered once more at the quality of
aloofness--