"I don't think," he said slowly, "you're glad to have me back. I don't want to marry you, I couldn't marry you; but I wish to Heaven you'd been glad! O Marian, I'm a coward and a fool, but if you'd been glad, I'd have gone down under it! I'd have married you then. I oughtn't to say this. It's all nonsense, and you're quite right. It's awfully fine of you to want to keep your word; but, you see, I didn't want your word. It's your heart I wanted. I used to say out there sometimes, when things were a bit thick, 'Never mind. If I get through, she'll be glad.'"
Marian drew herself up. This did not seem to her fair of Julian. She had prayed very earnestly to God for his safe return. Neither God nor he had been quite fair about it. This was not a safe return.
"I don't know what more I can do, Julian," she said steadily, "than offer to share my life with you."
"That's just it," said Julian, with that curious look in his eyes which kept fighting her, and yet appealing to her simultaneously. "You can't do more. If you could, I'm such a weak hound, I'd lie here and take it. If you wanted me, Marian,—wanted a broken fragment of a man fit for a dust-pan,—I'd land you with it. But, 'pon my word, it's too steep when you don't want it. Out of some curious sense of duty toward the dust-pan—I'm afraid I'm being uncivil to the universe, but I feel a little uncivil to it just now. No; you've got to go. I'm sorry. Don't touch me. Just let me be; but if you could say just where you are before you go! But it doesn't matter. I shouldn't believe it. I wouldn't believe the mother that bore me now. I've seen the end of love."
The tears burned themselves away from his eyes; they gazed at her as sunken and blue as the sea whipped by an east wind. She turned slowly toward the door.
"I want you to remember, Julian," she said, "that I meant what I said. I mean it still. I wish to carry out our engagement."
Julian said something in reply that Marian didn't understand. He was repeating out loud and very slowly the cipher he had sent to the Government.
After all, it had been easier to send the cipher to the Government than to release Marian. His mind had sprung back to the easier task.