"All his life," said Mary Carstairs, "my father has thought about nothing but himself. I am sorry for him—but he must take the consequences of that now. If he is lonely, it is his own making. If my mother has been lonely till it has almost killed her, that is his doing, too. For you—there was never any place in this. As for me, I owe him nothing. He must beg my mother's forgiveness before he shall ever get mine."
She came forward another half-step and laid her hand upon the gate-latch with a movement whose definiteness did not escape him.
"You may take back that answer from me if you wish. And so, good-bye."
"Not good-bye," said Varney, instantly. "You must not say that."
"I am quite sure that I have nothing else left to say."
Her eyes went past him over the gate, out into the wood beyond. Dusk was falling about them; it shaded her face, intangibly altered it, made it for the moment almost as he had known it before. She looked very young, and tired. This was the picture of her, and he knew it then as he looked at her, that he would carry with him to the longest day he lived.
"Is it nothing to you," he cried in a rush, "that when the time came I couldn't do it? The yacht's breaking down had nothing in the world to do with it. I had already decided to turn back, to break my promise. That the—accident happened just then was only a wretched chance. I was going to put about at that moment."
She hesitated almost imperceptibly, seemed for a brief second to waver. But perhaps she dared not let herself believe him now: perhaps the strongest wish of her heart was to hurt him as deeply as she could.
"To say the least," she said with a little deliberate movement of distaste, "your coincidences are unfortunate. You—won't mind if I go on being grateful to the—gear?"
Under that crowning taunt, his self-restraint snapped like an overstretched bow-string.