He waited a moment, then the words seemed to come out of themselves—despite him. "I'm not married yet, you know."
She started. "You don't mean——" Then she backed away from him, the silhouette of her slim figure very clear against the luminous background of sea and sky—every line of it dragging at his senses—hurting him with pity. "You know you couldn't do it," she said after a pause. "We neither of us could. It would kill her. Besides, I couldn't sneak another girl's man after the banns were up and the cake bought—a girl who'd never done me any harm. I aren't so low down as all that, yet."
"Anything is better than marrying without love," he said, but he said it half-heartedly. How was a decent man to throw over a charming devoted girl to whom he was to be married in a fortnight, shaming her before all her little world after he had sought and won her? He thought of Laura's soft acquiescence with an agony of self-reproach and impatience. Then he heard Caroline speaking again, her voice low and clear with the murmur of the sea running in and out of it—he felt it go to his heart.
"It's too late to begin to think whether you'll be miserable or not now," she said. "You made her fond of you. It was your own doing. And you wouldn't get me if you did give her up. I'd no more take you from her, now she's got her wedding-dress and all, than I'd stick a knife into a baby sleeping in its pram. She worships you—can't you see that? It would spoil all her life."
"What about yours—and mine?" he said. "You don't really care for me, or you couldn't talk like that."
She looked away to the glimmering sea, not troubling to answer him. What was the use? He knew.
"Well, I'll be getting on," she said at last.
But he found the hopelessness in her voice unbearable.
"Carrie, we can't leave it like this," he said. "I can't do without you; that's a fact. We must arrange something." He hesitated. "You—you won't cease to be friends with me just because I'm married, will you?"
She moved so quickly out of the reach of his hand that she stood poised on the extreme edge of the cliff. "What do you mean?" she said fiercely. "Is that what you take me for? Then let me tell you I never carried on with a married man in my life and never shall. You're as good as married now. Leave me alone. You think you can talk to me like that because I'm fond of you. But before I'd have anything to do with those underhand ways, I'd jump over this cliff and have done with it. I would, too. I aren't that sort, you know—though I have behaved like a silly fool."