.
Still in silence, they walked until they came to the brow of the hill,
at which place the path divides, one part of it winding across the
bridge to the stage road, and the other dropping down by a clump of
sailors' homes, west, to the sea. Enough light had come by this time to
see the boats lying at anchor in the cove and to distinguish Bigbie's
lugger from the rest, as she bobbed up and down, her sails spread and
ready to be off. At the sight of this boat Danvers turned suddenly, as
if recalled to his senses, and faced Nancy, as they stood at the
parting of the ways.

"God forgive me!" he cried. "Oh, God forgive me, but I can't do it! I
can't take ye. Not though you begged me on your knees; not though I
knew you'd die without me. Oh, can you ever forgive the words I've said
to you this morning? Will ye think rather that I'd choose to see ye
dead than gone with me in the way I've asked? That I'd rather die
myself than take ye; and that I love you, love you enough to give you
up! And it's I," he went on in a bitter self-scorn, "who have prated of
honor, and the conduct of gentlemen, who have made a beast of myself
before the best woman who ever lived! Who through selfishness have
tried to make her life a blacker ruin than I've made my own! Can you
forget it, Nancy? Can you ever forgive me for it?"

"Dandie," she said softly, "ye needn't worry about that. I knew you
wouldn't take me! I knew 'twas just that you were carried beyond
yourself by your sorrows that made you talk as you did at the bedroom
door. Look!" she said, opening the throat of the Connemara cloak and
showing him the neck of her thin white dressing blouse, "one doesn't
start to the Americas in clothes like that. I knew what you were and
understood; knew that, given your way, you would choose the best, as
you have done!" she cried, with the tears in her eyes. "Ye've stood
before temptation! You've done the thing that's right when it was hard
to do! and I'm proud to have seen you as I have this morning."

They were both crying by this time as they stood with hands clasped, on
one side the calls of the sailors coming up the slope, on the other the
echoes of a horn rolling along the frozen ground from the coach which
came to carry Danvers away.

"I may kiss you before I go?" he asked, with a longing in his tone
pitiable to hear.

"If ye think it's right," she answered. "If ye think that when ye look
back to this time in the years to come you will be hap