“Never tell—that you were here—that it wasn’t you?”
“Yes, let me stay dead. Everybody believes it, let them go on believing. It was death, my life since that night when Jim disappeared. It wasn’t worth going on with. Now I can go to him, be with him, there’ll be no one watching Sybil Saunders any more. Even if I looked like myself it would be only the chance resemblance to a murdered woman. And do I look like myself?”
She turned her face to the light, bright now with the coming of the sun. Below the smooth sweep of hair across her forehead it was so changed in its pallor and thinness, so bereft of its rounded curves and delicate freshness that it was only a dim reflection of Sybil’s—the face of a way-worn lad in whom the same blood ran.
The havoc worked by the suffering that had so transfigured it drove like a knife to Anne’s heart. She felt the prick of tears under her eyelids and lowered her head—Sybil gripping at her happiness with the fierce courage of despair, and now Sybil going, breaking all ties, going forever. For a moment she could not speak and the other, thinking her silence meant reluctance to agree, caught at her hands, pleading, with breathless urgence:
“They’ve accepted everything—it’s all explained and ended. Joe has gone, dropped out of sight. Boys of his kind do that, do something they’re ashamed of and disappear. What good would it do Stokes or Bassett or the police to know it was Joe who was killed? It’s not lies, it’s not being false to any one, it’s only to keep silent and let me go. Oh, Anne, we’ve been real friends, we’ve loved each other— Love me enough to let me be happy.”
The rim of the sun slipped above the distant sea line and sent a ray of brilliant light through the window. It touched their seated figures and lay rosy on Anne’s face as she raised it.
“Go,” she said softly. “Go. I’ll never tell—I’ll keep that promise as long as I live.”
She could stay no longer, the house would be waking soon. There was a rapid interchange of last injunctions, information for Sybil’s safety. To-night at low tide she would cross on the causeway. Every evidence of her occupation would be removed and with this in mind she took her Viola dress from its hiding-place and gave it to Anne. No one, ransacking the top floor at Gull Island would ever find a trace of her.
At the head of the stairs they clung together for a moment—a life-long good-by. There was no time for last words and they had no need of any. It was too solemn a farewell for speech. They were like shipwrecked comrades parted by tempest, Anne to find a haven, Sybil to ride forth on unknown seas, rapt and dauntless, following her star.
That night was cloudy—great black banks passing across the heavens. At times they broke and through serene open spaces the moon rode, silvering the sea, turning the pools and streamlets of the channel bed to a shining tracery. A boy’s figure that had started across the causeway in the dark, was caught in one of these transitory gleams, a flitting shadow on the straight bright path. It stood out in sharp silhouette, running on the slippery stones, then clouds swept across the moon and in the darkness it gained the shore and the sheltering trees. Padding light-footed on the wayside grass, it skirted the edge of the village.