d nothing.

"Had you ever any other love?"

"Never," said she, and the colour flew up into her pale face. She did
not at all understand the accusation brought against her, or the
fierceness of the accuser.

"Then apologise at once for the charge you have brought against me."

She looked up at him with knitted brows. She wanted to look at him, but
her eyes would drop again immediately.

"Are you not unreasonable?" she asked. "Years ago you made love to me.
Then you went away. Your father was ill, and you could not choose but
go, but you gave me to understand that you were coming back to me. You
never came. Do you call that faithfulness?"

"I wrote."

"Never."

"Margaret!" he cried indignantly. "I wrote and had your answer. Are you
dreaming?"

"You never wrote. In my life I never wrote to you."

"Good heavens! When I have your letter in my pocket! I wrote to you
asking if I might come back as your accepted lover, and you sent me this
in return," said he, giving her the paper for which he had searched his
pocket-book.

She took it and looked it over. When she gave it back her glance was
fixed far away over the miraculous river that ran with mimic waterfalls
through the gardens, and she was ghastly pale.

"I did not write that," she said. "You ought to have known it."

"It is your signature and your hand."

"It is like my hand. I never signed myself M. Mildmay. How could I, when
we were all M. Mildmay?"

A light broke in upon him. They were all M. Mildmay, of course, and he
remembered a long-forgotten feud with Miriam. He bit his lip and stamped
his foot angrily. What a fool he had been!

"I am sorry," said Margaret humbly. "For all the world I would not have
insulted you, and it is cruel that you should have had to think it of
me. I do apologise for any share I have had in it."

Her heart and throat were almost bursting with agony as she spoke in
those quiet tones, and he stamped away up the path with his back to her.

"Margaret!" he said, coming back and seizing her hands. "I thought I was
case-hardened, but just tell me that you loved me then!"

"I love you now," she answered, crying a little. "I am not of the sort
that changes in the matter of loving. Is it bold to say that, and I so
unattractive?"

"Hang your unattractiveness! Margaret, just say, 'I love you, Mark
Ratcliff,' and set me some atoning penance for my idiocy. You do not
know what a curse that vile paper has been to me," and he shot