He came up the rude steps hastily, a well-favoured young man of her own world, and almost her own age, which she felt was in some ways unfortunate then. As he seized both her hands, with a little resolute movement she drew them away from him.
"No," she said a trifle sharply. "As I told you last time, that is all done with now. It was a little weak of me to see you, and you must not come here again."
The colour faded in the young man's face, and he clenched his hands spasmodically.
"Oh!" he said, with a catch in his breath, "you can't mean it, Carrie. In spite of what you told me, I had been trying to believe the thing was out of the question."
There was pain in Carrie Denham's face, and a little bitter smile flickered into her eyes.
"The thing one shrinks from most is generally the one that happens—unless one does something to make it impossible," she said.
The man reddened, for, though he was pleasant to look at, a stalwart, open-faced Englishman, he was very young, and it was, perhaps, not his fault that there was a lack of stiffness in his composition. He was not one to grapple resolutely with an emergency, and Carrie Denham, who had once looked up to him, realised it then.
"What could I do—what could anybody in my place do?" he said, with a little gesture that suggested desperation. "Stanley Crossthwaite is only sixty, and may live another twenty years. While he does, I'm something between his head keeper and a pensioner."
"Isn't it a pity you didn't think of that earlier?"
The man made as though he would have seized her hands again, but she drew back from him with a slight shiver of hopelessness running through her.