"Is that all?" breathed Caroline. "I don't see what difference that made."
"Don't you? Well, perhaps not—but any man would," he answered. "I was faced with ruin unless I could tide things over, and I couldn't take the money and be philandering with another girl at the same time."
"You didn't seem to hold those views until the last week or two," she said.
"I had not borrowed the money before," he said shortly. "Though I knew well enough I was not doing the square thing there, either by you or her."
She looked at him with a keen, set, impersonal intentness in her gaze which he could not understand. "Then you are sure she does not care enough for you to marry you? She threw you over because she wanted to stop single?"
"No doubt of that," he said with a sort of rueful conviction. "Though, of course, being the girl she is, she was frightfully upset at the idea of behaving badly to me. As a matter of fact, she seemed so distressed during the whole interview that I couldn't help feeling ashamed of myself. I couldn't let her reproach herself so acutely; I had to tell her I—I wasn't broken-hearted."
"She would wonder why, didn't she?" said Caroline, in a tone which he could not understand.
"Yes," he answered. "So I told her."
"What did you say?"
He waited a moment, looking down at the slim figure outlined darkly against the immense radiance of the sea. But he did not touch her. This was a different thing indeed from that hot wooing on the top of the cliff.