All the best and noblest in Jim Airth awoke at that hallowed memory of faithful strength on his part, and trustful peace on hers.
“My God,” he said, “what a nightmare it has been! And what a fool, I, to think anything could come between us. Has she not been utterly mine since that sacred night spent here? And I have left her to loneliness and grief?.... I will arise and go to my belovèd. No past, no shame, no pride of mine, shall come between us any more.”
He raised himself on his elbow and looked over the edge. The moonlight shone on rippling water lapping the foot of the cliff. He could see his watch by its bright light. Midnight! He must wait until three, for the tide to go down. He leaned back again, his arms folded across his chest; but Myra was still safely within them.
Two minutes later, Jim Airth slept soundly.
The dawn awoke him. He scrambled down to the shore, and once again swam up the golden path toward the rising sun.
As he got back into his clothes, it seemed to him that every vestige of that black nightmare had been left behind in the gay tossing waters.
On his way to the railway station, he passed a farm. The farmer’s wife had been up since sunrise, churning. She gladly gave him a simple breakfast of home-made bread, with butter fresh from the churn.
He caught the six o’clock express for town; tubbed, shaved, and lunched, at his Club.
At a quarter to three he was just coming down the steps into Piccadilly, very consciously “clothed and in his right mind,” debating which train he could take for Shenstone if—as in duty bound—he looked in at his publishers’ first; when a telegraph boy dashed up the steps into the Club, and the next moment the hall-porter hastened after him with a telegram.
Jim Airth read it; took one look at his watch; then jumped headlong into a passing taxicab.