anchor
me in the harbour of convention, leaving me free to become what I am
fashioned to become--autocrat and arbiter in my own world. And now!
and now! I don't know--truly I don't know what I may become. Your
love forces my hand. I am displaying all the shallowness, falseness,
pettiness, all the mean, and cruel and callous character which must be
truly my real self. ... Only I shall not marry you! You are not to run
the risk of what I might prove to be when I remember in bitterness all
I have renounced. If I married you I should remember, unreconciled, what
you cost me. Better for you and for me that I marry him, and let him
bear with me when I remember that he cost me you!"

She bent over, almost double, closing her eyes with small clenched
hands; and he saw the ring shimmering in the sunshine, and her hair,
heavily, densely gold, and the white nape of her neck, and the tiny
close-set ears, and the curved softness of cheek and chin; every smooth,
childlike contour and mould--rounded arms, slim, flowing lines of body
and limb--all valued at many millions by her as her own appraiser.

Suddenly, deep within him, something seemed to fail, die out--perhaps a
tiny newly lighted flame of unaccustomed purity, the dawning flicker of
aspiration to better things. Whatever it was, material, spiritual, was
gone now, and where it had glimmered for a night, the old accustomed
twilit doubt crept in--the same dull acquiescence--the same uncertainty
of self, the familiar lack of will, of incentive, the congenial tendency
to drift; and with it came weariness--perhaps reaction from the recent
skirmishes with that master-vice.

"I suppose," he said in a dull voice, "you are right."

"No, I am wrong--wrong!" she said, lifting her lovely face and heavy
eyes. "But I have chosen my path. ... And you will forget."

"I hope so," he said simply.

"If you hope so, you will."

He nodded, unconvinced, watching a flock of sand-pipers whirling into
the cove like a gray snow-squall and fearlessly settling on the beach.

After a while, with a long breath: "Then it is settled," she concluded.

If she expected corroboration from him she received none; and perhaps
she was not awaiting it. She sat very still, her eyes lost in thought.

And Mortimer, peeping down at them over the thicket above, yawned
impatiently and glanced about him for the most convenient avenue of
self-effacement when the time arrived.

CHAPTER VII PERSUASION

The days