had done, he had claimed nothing less than friendship. He was,
she told herself, like an old friend. And yet he was also unlike one;
for, in intercourse with old friends, people are not subject alternately
to impulses towards unrestrained intimacy and reactions to shy reserve.
She liked him, but she was afraid of him; in fine, she was hardly happy
with him, and not happy--The confession could not be finished even to
herself.

"Shall you be glad to go home, or sorry?" he asked.

"Oh, I shall be very sorry."

"Then," he suggested, smiling, "why not stay?"

The question came pat in tune with those thoughts that would not be
suppressed. Before she knew what she was doing--before she had time to
reflect that probably his words were merely an idle civility or the
playful suggestion of an impossibility, she exclaimed,

"What do you----?"

She stopped suddenly, in horror at herself; for she found him looking at
her with surprise, and she felt her face flooded with colour.

"I beg your pardon?" said Medland.

Full of anger and shame, she could not answer him. Without a shadow of
excuse--she could not find a shadow of excuse--she had read into his
words a meaning he never thought of. She could not now conceive how she
had done it. If told the like about another, she knew how scornfully
severe her judgment would have been. He had surprised her, caught her
unawares, and wrung from her an open expression of a wild idea that she
had refused to recognise even in her own heart. She felt that her cheeks
were red. Would the glow that burnt her never go?--and she bit her lips,
for she was near tears. Oh, that he might not have seen! Or had she
committed the sin unpardonable to a girl such as she was? Had she
betrayed herself unasked?

"Nothing," she stammered at last. "Nothing." But she felt the heat still
in her cheeks. She would have given the world to be able to tell him not
to look at her; but she knew his puzzled eyes still sought hers, in hope
of light.

He might at least say something! Silently he walked by her side along
the road to Government House--that endless, endless road. She could not
speak--and he--she only knew that he did not. She felt, by a subtle
perception, his glance turned on her now and again, but he did not break
the silence. The strain was too much; in spite of all her efforts, in
spite of a hatred of her own weakness that would have made her, for the
moment, sooner die, a hysterical sob burst from he