burned in her heart; she longed to make him feel something of the
anguish she had needlessly undergone.

He sat watching her averted face. "Miss Breen," he said huskily, "will
you let me speak to you?"

"Oh, you have me in your power," she answered cruelly. "Say what you
like."

He did not speak, nor make any motion to do so.

A foolish, idle curiosity to know what, after all that had happened,
he could possibly have to say, stirred within her, but she disdainfully
stifled it. They were both so still that a company of seals found it
safe to put their heads above water, and approach near enough to examine
her with their round soft eyes. She turned from the silly things in
contempt that they should even have interested her. She felt that from
time to time her companion lifted an anxious glance to the dull heavens.
At last the limp sail faintly stirred; it flapped; it filled shallowly;
the boat moved. The sail seemed to have had a prescience of the wind
before it passed over the smooth water like a shadow.

When a woman says she never will forgive a man, she always has a
condition of forgiveness in her heart. Now that the wind had risen
again, "I have no right to forbid you to speak," she said, as if no
silence had elapsed, and she turned round and quietly confronted him;
she no longer felt so impatient to escape.

He did not meet her eye at once, and he seemed in no haste to avail
himself of the leave granted him. A heavy sadness blotted the gayety of
a face whose sunny sympathy had been her only cheer for many days. She
fancied a bewilderment in its hopelessness which smote her with still
sharper pathos. "Of course," she said, "I appreciate your wish to do
what I wanted, about Mrs. Maynard. I remember my telling you that she
ought n't to go out, that day. But that was not the way to do it"--

"There was no other," he said.

"No," she assented, upon reflection. "Then it ought n't to have been
done."

He showed no sign of intending to continue, and after a moment of
restlessness, she began again.

"If I have been rude or hasty in refusing to hear you, Mr. Libby, I am
very wrong. I must hear anything you have to say."

"Oh, not unless you wish."

"I wish whatever you wish."

"I'm not sure that I wish that now. I have thought it over; I should
only distress you for nothing. You are letting me say why sentence
shouldn't be passed upon me. Sentence is going to be passed any way. I
should only repeat what I h