e answered.

The service of dinner came to its appointed end. Tallente drank one
glass of port alone. Then he rose, left the room by the French windows,
passed along the terrace and looked in at the drawing-room, where Stella
was lingering over her coffee.

"Will you walk with me as far as the lookout?" he invited. "Your maid
can bring you a cloak if you are likely to be cold."

She responded a little ungraciously, but appeared a few minutes later, a
filmy shawl of lace covering her bare shoulders. She walked by his side
to the end of the terrace, along the curving walk through the
plantation, and by the sea wall to the flagged space where some seats
and a table had been fixed. Four hundred feet below, the sea was
beating against jagged rocks. The moon was late and it was almost dark.
She leaned over and he stood by her side.

"Stella," he said, "you asked me at dinner when we were leaving here.
You are leaving to-morrow morning by the twelve-thirty train."

"What do you mean?" she demanded, with a sudden sinking of the heart.

"Please do not ask," he replied. "You know and I know. It is not my
wish to make public the story of our--disagreement."

She was silent for several moments, looking over into the black gulf
below, watching the swirl of the sea, listening to its dull booming
against the distant rocks, the shriek of the backward-dragged pebbles.
An owl flew out from some secret place in the cliffs and wheeled across
the bay. She drew her shawl around her with a little shiver.

"So this is the end," she answered.

"No doubt, in my way," he reflected, "I have been as great a
disappointment to you as you to me. You brought me your great wealth,
believing that I could use it towards securing just what you desired in
the way of social position. Perhaps that might have come but for the
war. Now I have become rather a failure."

"There was no necessity for you ever to have gone soldiering," she
reminded him a little hardly.

"As you say," he acquiesced. "Still, I went and I do not regret it. I
might even remind you that I met with some success."

"Pooh!" she scoffed. "What is the use of a few military distinctions?
What are an M.C. and a D.S.O. and a few French and Belgian orders going
to do for me? You know I want other things. They told me when I
married you," she went on, warming with her own sense of injury, "that
you were certain to be Prime Minister. They told me that the Coalition
Party couldn't do w