of it. I suppose my outside is the best
side of me--and that's left, at any rate. I have not lost my good looks,
have I? There! there! never mind answering; don't trouble yourself to
pay me compliments. I have been admired enough to-day. First the sailor,
and then Mr. Noel Vanstone--enough for any woman's vanity, surely! Have
I any right to call myself a woman? Perhaps not: I am only a girl in
my teens. Oh, me, I feel as if I was forty!" She scattered the last
fragments of grass to the winds; and turning her back on the captain,
let her head droop till her cheek touched the turf bank. "It feels
soft and friendly," she said, nestling to it with a hopeless tenderness
horrible to see. "It doesn't cast me off. Mother Earth! The only mother
I have left!"

Captain Wragge looked at her in silent surprise. Such experience of
humanity as he possessed was powerless to sound to its depths the
terrible self-abandonment which had burst its way to the surface in her
reckless words--which was now fast hurrying her to actions more reckless
still. "Devilish odd!" he thought to himself, uneasily. "Has the loss of
her lover turned her brain?" He considered for a minute longer and
then spoke to her. "Leave it till to-morrow," suggested the captain
confidentially. "You are a little tired to-night. No hurry, my dear
girl--no hurry."

She raised her head instantly, and looked round at him with the same
angry resolution, with the same desperate defiance of herself, which
he had seen in her face on the memorable day at York when she had acted
before him for the first time. "I came here to tell you what is in my
mind," she said; "and I _will_ tell it!" She seated herself upright on
the slope; and clasping her hands round her knees, looked out steadily,
straight before her, at the slowly darkening view. In that strange
position, she waited until she had composed herself, and then addressed
the captain, without turning her head to look round at him, in these
words:

"When you and I first met," she began, abruptly, "I tried hard to keep
my thoughts to myself. I know enough by this time to know that I failed.
When I first told you at York that Michael Vanstone had ruined us, I
believe you guessed for yourself that I, for one, was determined not to
submit to it. Whether you guessed or not, it is so. I left my friends
with that determination in my mind; and I feel it in me now stronger,
ten times stronger, than ever."

"Ten times stronger than ev