; "it is not pride but weakness. You could have
told him what you knew to be true: that there could be nothing in
common between her folk and such savages as we; that there was a gulf
as wide as that Marsh and as black between our natures, our training
and theirs, and even if they came to us across it, now and then, to
suit their pleasure, light and easy as that tide--it was still there to
some day ground and swamp them! And if he doubted it, you had only to
tell him your own story. You had only to tell him what you have just
told me--that you yourself, an officer and a gentleman, thought you
loved me, a vulgar, uneducated, savage girl, and that I, kinder to you
than you to me or him, made you take it back across that tide, because
I couldn't let you link your life with me, and drag you in the mire."

"You need not have said that, Miss Culpepper," returned Calvert with
the same gentle smile, "to prove that I am your inferior in all but one
thing."

"And that?" she said quickly.

"Is my love."

His gentle face was as set now as her own as he moved back slowly
towards the door. There he paused.

"You tell me to speak of Jim, and Jim only. Then hear me. I believe
that Miss Preston cares for him as far as lies in her young and giddy
nature. I could not, therefore, have crushed HIS hope without
deceiving him, for there are as cruel deceits prompted by what we call
reason as by our love. If you think that a knowledge of this plain
truth would help to save him, I beg you to be kinder to him than you
have been to me,--or even, let me dare to hope, to YOURSELF."

He slowly crossed the threshold, still holding his cap lightly in his
hand.

"When I tell you that I am going away to-morrow on a leave of absence,
and that in all probability we may not meet again, you will not
misunderstand why I add my prayer to the message your friends in
Logport charged me with. They beg that you will give up your idea of
returning here, and come back to them. Believe me, you have made
yourself loved and respected there, in spite--I beg pardon--perhaps I
should say BECAUSE of your pride. Good-night and good-bye."

For a single instant she turned her set face to the window with a
sudden convulsive movement, as if she would have called him back, but
at the same moment the opposite door creaked and her brother slipped
into the room. Whether a quick memory of the deserter's entrance at
that door a year ago had crossed her mind, wh