in the dictionary and wrote Nona. There it was, and it was the
most exact thing--'Nona: goods shipwrecked and found floating in the
sea.' I meant to have torn out the page. I forgot. I left it there and
Tony saw it."

Sabre said, "What did he say?" In all she had told him there was
something omitted. He knew that his question approached the missing
quantity. But she did not answer it.

She went on, "Well, there was you. And I began to want you most awfully.
You were always such a dear, slow person; and I wanted that most
awfully. You were so steady and good and you had such quiet old ideas
about duty and rightness and things, and you thought about things so,
and I wanted that most frightfully. You see, I'd known you all my
life--well, that's how it was, Marko. That explains all the things you
asked. I said 'There'; and I said I had to come; because I'd wanted it
so much, so long. And I wanted you to write to me because I did want to
go on having the help I had from you--"

He had desired her to look at him, but it was he who had turned away. He
sat with his head between his hands, his elbows on his knees.

She repeated, with rather a plaintive note, as though in his pose she
saw some pain she had caused him, "You see, I had known you all my life,
Marko--"

He said, still looking upon the ground between his feet, "But you
haven't explained anything. You've only told me. You haven't explained
why."

She said with astounding simplicity, "Well, you see, Marko, I made a
mistake. I made a most frightful mistake. I chose. I chose wrong. I
ought to have married you, Marko."

And his words were a groan. "Nona--Nona--"

CHAPTER VII

I

He was presently walking back, returning to Tidborough.

He was trying very hard, all his life's training against sudden
unbridling of his bridled passions, to grapple his mind back from its
wild and passionate desires and from its amazed coursings upon the
immense prairies, teeming with hazards, fears, enchantments, hopes,
dismays, that broke before this hour as breaks upon the hunter's gaze,
amazingly awarded from the hill, savannas boundless, new,
unpathed,--from these to grapple back his mind to its schooled thought
and ordered habit, to its well-trodden ways of duty, obligation,
rectitude. He had not left them. But for that cry of her name wrung from
him by sudden application of pain against whose shock he was not
steeled, he had answered nothing to her lamentable disclosu