Josephine gave only a long sobbing sigh, as one awakening from a dream. She looked at the boat again, and the men preparing it, and then at Caius—straight in his eyes she looked, as if searching his face for something more.
"Follow your own conscience, Josephine; it is truer than ours. I was wrong to let you be tempted," he said. "Forgive me!"
She looked again at the boat and at the sea, and then, in the stayed subdued manner that had become too habitual to her, she said to O'Shea:
"I will go home now. Dr. Simpson is right. I cannot go."
O'Shea was too clever a man to make an effort to hold what he knew to be lost; he let go her rein, and she rode up the path that led to the island road. When she was gone O'Shea turned upon Caius with a look of mingled scorn and loathing.
"Ye're afraid of Le Maître coming after ye," he hissed; "or ye have a girl at home, and would foind it awkward to bring her and madam face to face; so ye give her up, the most angel woman that ever trod this earth, to be done to death by a beast, because ye're afraid for yer own skin. Bah! I had come to think better of ye."
With that he cut at the horse with a stick he had in his hand, and the creature, wholly unaccustomed to such pain and indignity, dashed along the shore, by chance turning homeward. Caius, carried perforce as upon the wings of the wind for half a mile, was thrown off upon the sand. He picked himself up, and with wet clothes and sore limbs walked to his little house, which he felt he could no longer look upon as a home.
He could hardly understand what he had done; he began to regret it. A man cannot see the forces at work upon his inmost self. He did not know that Josephine's soul had taken his by the hand and lifted it up—that his love for her had risen from earth to heaven when he feared the slightest wrong-doing for her more than all other misfortune.