limp stalks, chilled by
the frost of the previous night; but the sun lay warm over the wide,
white steps, over the lawn and over the bay beyond. She stood for a
moment, staring thoughtfully out across the bay; then she moved on
to the western end of the veranda, looked up at Table Mountain with
its cloth of cloud, and then dropped down into one of the chairs
which still remained in the sunny corner.

That corner held many memories for her. She had sought it now
unconsciously; yet, once there, she lingered, although for weeks
past she had been seeking to banish those memories from her life.
Why keep them? They belonged to a chapter that was dead and gone.
Better to seal its pages and never break the seal. Better never to
reread what had been written there. If she had been mistaken in
giving her love where it was not desired, not only should the world
never be aware of the fact; but she herself would ignore the
existence of that mistake. She had loved Weldon with all the energy
of her headstrong, girlish nature. She had supposed that he had
loved her in return. Instead of that, he had gone away and left her
without a word, just when her need for him was the greatest. No man
in his senses could have seen the agony of that last hour she had
spent with Captain Frazer, and failed to understand the pitiful,
appealing look she had cast upon him. Unable to escape the agony,
she had given this tacit call to Weldon to share it with her, to
understand, and to forgive. She had been sure she could trust him;
but it was evident that she had trusted him in vain. In the hour of
her supremest need, he had gone away and left her alone. No man who
cared for her could have forsaken her in such a crisis as that. Her
lips curved into a hard little smile, as she sat rocking to and fro
in the sunshine, and, going back over a past which she had rarely
allowed herself to reopen.

And afterwards? Afterwards Fate had been all against her. It had
been easy to escape from her engagement at Johannesburg,
comparatively easy to shut the past experience into the inner places
of her mind, to close her lips with the show of a smile, and to
plunge into a whirl of social life which should leave her no time
for quiet thought. So long as she kept her secret to herself, it
mattered nothing to the girl that it was eating pitilessly at her
vitality, that it was ever hard and harder for her to keep up her
ceaseless round of gayety.

And then, all at once, the