"You really thought that?" A queer note came into her voice and she added almost in a whisper as if echoing it to herself: "Just because you were geographically near!"
"Why else?" he demanded. "Of course, in your indignation against that brute Holbury, you momentarily thought of me with contrasting emotion. I understood that, but I never exaggerated it into anything more important—or permanent."
"No. You just thought me a frivolous little idiot, and the estimate was annoyingly correct. I knew that—and yet I hadn't quite realized how meanly you did think of me—until now."
"But, Marian—!"
"If you thought," she went on, and in the starlight, he could not see how the color had left even her lips, "if you thought that—even in those circumstances—even driven by terror of my life—I would have fled to any other man in the world—" Abruptly she broke off.
Stuart Farquaharson's forgotten pipe had died to ashes. Now it fell with a tiny crash to the deck. The man leaned forward toward her and his eyes mirrored an astonishment genuine and absolute.
"Do you mean ... that you really fancied ... that you loved me?"
She turned her face away until he could see only the roundness of her check's contour and the curling softness of the hair on her neck. Her voice carried a burden of lethargic weariness. "No, I didn't fancy it ... I knew it ... I've known it ever since."
As Stuart Farquaharson remained silent in the amazement of these declarations, Marian turned her face again upon him. This time she spoke with a fiery impetuosity:
"I suppose I should be burning with shame at confessing that ... only somehow I've never been able to realize why people should blush so at the truth ... and, as I said a moment ago, since it's over, there's no reason why I shouldn't tell you, is there?"