to ask it. And now her whole being hung trembling on the answer,
though she was no less grimly resolved than before to have done with a
man whom she could not trust. But now he did not reply; and that
burning urge of curiosity made Caroline go on--against better judgment,
intention, pride: "Does she know?"
He released Caroline's arm at once and walked on. "Let us leave her
out of the discussion," he said stiffly. "I was just about to tell you
that our engagement is broken off."
But Caroline could not understand--any more than the majority of
women--the feeling which makes a decent man reluctant to discuss an old
love with a new one, and she was now easily able to speak as coldly as
she wished. "I've heard that piece of news," she said.
He turned sharp round. "Why, who told you? It only happened last
night."
"Miss Laura told me," she answered.
"What more did she tell you?" he asked quickly.
"Nothing."
He looked away from her to the sea without replying, and this was her
chance to walk away, if she had wished; but there was still that
question which she must have answered.
"Has Miss Laura heard anything about us? Was that why the engagement
was broken off?"
He waited a moment. "No," he said. "After all, you have a right to
know that you had nothing to do with it. Nothing. She had never heard
a word about you and me until I told her myself; and that was after our
engagement was broken off."
"Then why did you----?" She paused, so filled with all sorts of
conflicting desires and emotions--longing to know, and yet passionately
telling herself it didn't matter to her--that she had lost all
certainty in herself, and her voice came sharp and tremulous.
"She simply threw me over," he said at last. "Found out she didn't
like the idea of married life, though she was very fond of me. I
suppose there are women like that in every civilized community. No
doubt if she were a Roman Catholic she would be a nun, and she would be
a good one. She's good all through. I realize that, in spite of what
has happened."
Caroline looked at him as he faced the sea in the strong light--at his
heavy features, his broadly set figure, his whole air of knowledge and
virility and strength. Then the words fluttered up into her throat
without any volition of her own: "Oh, you well may think her good! You
well may!"
For in that moment she guessed what Laura had come to tell her but had
not been able to say after all. That heavenly kindness of Laura's was
actually deep enough and real enough to make her spare her lover the
knowledge of how he had wounded her. It was clear enough that she--who
always seemed so easy and simple--had detected the first little change
in him when he became attracted to Caroline. So she had put off her
wedding to make sure, and she had become sure.
Caroline opened her lips to say with passion: "Can't you _see_ what she
did it for?" But before the words left her lips, there came into her
mind a memory of Laura's face as it looked when she left the door of
the Cottage, which was so vivid as to be almost an illusion. Now she
knew what the anxious, uncertain gaze of those brown eyes into her own
had really meant.
Laura had been trying to say all the time: "Don't tell him! don't tell
him!" But the complexities involved had been too great, when it came
to the point, for anything to be actually said.
Caroline waited to get back her self-command, stirred by a sudden
loyalty to her own sex which made her long to pierce his masculine
obtuseness--to show him what Laura had sacrificed and what he had
missed. And as he watched her, he wondered once more at the quality of
aloofness--of something fresh and cool despite her passion--which had
caused him to think of a nymph on fire when he first held her in his
arms.
"Well?" he said at last. "It's all right now, isn't it?"
She shook her head. "I'm not going to begin that all over again," she
said rather drearily. "You made me look silly once, but you won't have
a chance a second time. So long as you thought you might marry Miss
Laura, you were afraid of the talk and kept out of my way. Now she has
turned you down, you come after me again. I don't know why. Just for
your own fun, I suppose. You can't deny you avoided me."
"No." He stood with his hands thrust deep into his pockets. "I don't.
But I was in a devil of a hole, Caroline. I was engaged to marry a
good girl, and a nice girl, and shortly after the wedding day was fixed
I did a thing which only a cad would have done." He paused, Caroline
gazing at him with wide eyes. Then he went on: "I borrowed a large sum
of money from her."
"Is that all?" breathed Caroline. "I don't see what difference that
made."
"Don't you? Well, perhaps not--but any man would," he answered. "I
was faced with ruin unless I could tide things over, and I couldn't
take the money and be philandering with another girl at the same time."
"You didn't seem to hold those views until the last week or two," she
said.
"I had not borrowed the money before," he said shortly. "Though I knew
well enough I was not doing the square thing there, either by you or
her."
She looked at him with a keen, set, impersonal intentness in her gaze
which he could not understand. "Then you are sure she does not care
enough for you to marry you? She threw you over because she wanted to
stop single?"
"No doubt of that," he said with a sort of rueful conviction. "Though,
of course, being the girl she is, she was frightfully upset at the idea
of behaving badly to me. As a matter of fact, she seemed so distressed
during the whole interview that I couldn't help feeling ashamed of
myself. I couldn't let her reproach herself so acutely; I had to tell
her I--I wasn't broken-hearted."
"She would wonder why, didn't she?" said Caroline, in a tone which he
could not understand.
"Yes," he answered. "So I told her."
"What did you say?"
He waited a moment, looking down at the slim figure outlined darkly
against the immense radiance of the sea. But he did not touch her.
This was a different thing indeed from that hot wooing on the top of
the cliff.
"I told her," he answered bluntly, at last, "that I was in love with
you and wanted to marry you."
"And she----?" Caroline did not respond any more than that;
incredibly, to him, she was still thinking about Laura---- And he
stood looking at her with the same odd mixture of curiosity and desire
which had all along marked his pursuit of her, though beneath it there
was now something deeper, more human, more permanent. He wanted to
know---- But even when he did know, she would be his--his to take care
of and fight for and help up in the world.
At last he gave the answer she was waiting for. "Laura took it quite
differently from what I expected," he said. "She was awfully decent
about it. I think she was relieved, in a way, to find she had not got
me on her mind. She must have been afraid I should be very unhappy, of
course. She would always be so sorry about anything like that, that I
wonder she had the heart to throw me over, even though she didn't want
me."
Caroline said nothing. Oddly enough, though she had not heard the
sound of the waves before, the melancholy swish! swish! now echoed
through her very soul. When she felt a salt taste on her lips she
thought it was a drop of spray from the sea, then she felt the faint
trickling sensation of another and another running down her cheeks.
"Caroline!" he said, putting his arm about her and bending his face to
hers. "You're crying! What is it, little girl?"
She pulled herself away from him, sobbing out with a wild earnestness
which he found incomprehensible: "No! No! You can't start yet. You
have her kisses on your mouth yet."
"You didn't seem to mind that before," he said, suddenly white with
anger. "I don't know why you should start to be jealous of Laura now
everything is over."
"I'm not jealous," she said. "It is not that." Then she stopped
short. He must believe what he liked, for she could not betray the
secret of a girl whose love, she felt, was finer than her own.
"Well, you have no need to be jealous," he said. "She spoke nicely
about you. She was awfully decent about it, and hoped you and she
would be friends."
"Oh! I wish we could be," said Caroline, but deep down in her own
consciousness she knew this would never happen; because it is not in
human nature for a woman to cease being jealous of another who has done
more than herself for the man she loves.
He stood there disconsolately, kicking a pebble. He had come hot-foot
to claim her, never anticipating a check; and now she seemed to be
somehow drifting farther and farther away from him.
"I don't know if you are still thinking about the money Laura lent me,"
he said at last. "I begin to wish now I hadn't told you. But I wanted
to have everything quite straight." He paused. "As a matter of fact,
I have paid it back. The bank was a bit awkward at first, but I was
able to come to an arrangement with them a day or two ago, and I have
repaid Laura what she lent me." He paused again, looking at her almost
comically: "There, I hope you quite understand?"
They were indeed talking to each other more like enemies than lovers;
and Caroline seemed to be more than ever withdrawn and aloof--for all
her ignorance and simplicity of feeling--when she answered him in an
inward brooding tone: "Yes, I understand." For she really saw neither
Godfrey nor the shore, only Laura coming flushed out of the door marked
"Private" behind the bank counter. For now--at last--she did see where
it all led. She had to join issue with Laura to spare the pride of
this man whom both loved. His faith in his own power of overcoming
difficulties was the foundation on which his life was built, and they
must not pull it from under him. She, at any rate, could not so
humiliate him.
"The difficulty was only temporary," he went on, trying to find out
what she was waiting for. "I tried to do too much business for my
capital. But I'm bound to get on. We shall be all right."
"Don't!" she said sharply. "I don't care about money. I wasn't
thinking about that."
"Then what's the matter?"
She looked at him dumbly, and something in her tear-stained face tugged
irresistibly at his heartstrings. "Don't look like that," he said.
"Let's forget all that has happened before. You don't mean you will
turn me down, too?"
She shook her head, still unable to keep back the tears.
"Then why are you crying?" he said, putting his arm round her.
"There's nothing to cry for, Carrie." He spoke to her soothingly,
tenderly, as a man might to a child who was in trouble.
"Oh, Godfrey!" She drew herself away from him once more. "I aren't
half as good as her. I aren't half as good as her. You'd have been a
great deal happier and more comfortable with her."
"I know that," he said. "But I don't want to be happy and comfortable.
I want to live." He caught hold of her hand, which he crushed so
tightly that it hurt. "And I want you with me."
They heard a sudden noise from the cliff top where two boys raced and
shouted, so they walked on. Feathery clots of foam blew before them on
the sand, almost as if sea-flowers from the changeless ocean were being
flung in the pathway of that which is unchangeable in human life.
After a while Caroline said with a start, waking out of her dream: "I
wonder what Mrs. Bradford will say? But she won't be so upset as Miss
Ethel would have been." She lowered her voice. "Do you know what Miss
Panton said it was that actually killed Miss Ethel? It was everything
being so different."
"Yes." He paused. "Well, thousands of people are dying from the same
cause, I suppose, all over the world--middle-aged ones, that is." Then
he strengthened his grasp on her arm. "But we're young. We're all
right. Eh, Caroline?"
THE END