l me what it is?" she said.

"No." He got to his feet, and stood looking down at her. "I can't tell
you now. I am not in a position to do so. I am going away for a few
days. You will wait here till I come back?"

"Unless Robin comes," she said. "And then, of course, I would leave you
a message."

He nodded.

"Otherwise you will stay here?"

"If you are sure you wish it," she said.

"I do. And I am going to leave you this." He laid a packet upon the
table. "It is better for you to be independent, for the sake of
appearances." His iron mouth twitched a little. "Now, good-bye! You
won't be more miserable than you can help?"

She smiled up at him bravely.

"No; I won't be miserable. How long shall you be gone?"

"Possibly a week, possibly a little more."

"But you will come back?" she said quickly, almost beseechingly.

"I shall certainly come back," he said.

With the words his great hand closed firmly upon hers, and she had a
curious, vagrant feeling of insecurity that she could not attempt to
analyse. Then abruptly he let her go. An instant his eyes still held
her, and then, before she could begin to thank him, he turned to the
door and was gone.

V

For ten days, that seemed to her like as many years, Sybil Denham waited
in the shelter into which she had been so relentlessly thrust for an
answer to her letter to Bowker Creek, and during the whole of that time
she lived apart, exchanging scarcely a word with any one. Every day,
generally twice a day, she went down to the wharf; but, she could not
bring herself to linger. The loneliness that perpetually dogged her
footsteps was almost poignant there, and sometimes she came away with
panic at her heart. Suppose Mercer also should forsake her! She had not
the faintest idea what she would do if he did. And yet, whenever she
contemplated his return, she was afraid. There was something about the
man that she had never fathomed--something ungovernable, something
brutal--from which instinctively she shrank.

On the evening of the tenth day she received her answer--a letter from
Rollandstown by post. The handwriting she knew so well sprawled over the
envelope which her trembling fingers could scarcely open. Relief was
her first sensation, and after it came a nameless anxiety. Why had he
written? How was it--how was it that he had not come to her?

Trembling all over, she unfolded the letter, and read:

"Dear Sybil,--I am infernally sorry to have brou