"Is this your promise? Does this mean that you belong to me?"
Her breath caressed his cheek as she whispered:
"Yes."
He was thrilled and intoxicated and tortured at once to know himself her chosen. Ah! why was he not free? Why had Chance and Luck and Fate forced him to play a part like this?
"I wish to Heaven we had met a year ago!" he broke out impulsively. "Half-a-dozen years ago—only you'd have been a mere kid—too young to understand what Love means.... Why, Lynette darling! what is the matter? What have I said that hurt?"
Her arms had fallen from about his neck. She shrank away from him. He drew back, shocked into silence by the sudden, dreadful change in her. Her eyes, curiously dulled and faded, looked at Beauvayse as though they saw not him, but another man, through him and behind him. Her face was peaked and pinched; her supple, youthful figure contracted and bent like that of a woman withered by some wasting sickness, her dainty garments seemed to lose their colouring and their freshness, and hang on her, by some strange illusion wrought by the working of her mind upon his, like sordid rags. Against the splendid riot of life and colour over and under and about her, she looked like some slender sapling ringed and blighted, and ruined by the inexorable worm. For she was remembering the tavern on the veld. She was recalling what had been—realising what must henceforth be, in its fullest meaning. She shuddered, and her half-open mouth drew in the air in gasps, and the blankness of her stare appalled him. He called in alarm:
"Lynette dearest! what is the matter? Why do you look at me like that? Lynette!"
She did not answer. She shook like a leaf in the wind, and stared through him and beyond him into the Past. That was all. There was a rustling of leaves and branches higher on the bank, and the sound of thick woollen draperies trailing through grass. The bush on the edge of the cleared space that was about the great boulder was parted by a white, strong hand and a black-sleeved arm, and the Mother-Superior moved out into the open, and came down with those long, swift steps of hers to where they were. Her eyes, sweeping past Beauvayse, fastened on the drooping, stricken figure of the girl, read the altered face, and then she turned them on the boy, and they were stern as those of some avenging Angel, and her white wimple, laundried to snowy immaculateness by the capable hands of Sister Tobias, framed a face as white.
"What is the reason of—this? What has passed between you to account for it? Has your mother's son no sense of honour, sir?"
The icy tone of contempt stung him to risk the leap. He drew himself to his splendid height, and answered, his brave young eyes boldly meeting the stern eyes that questioned him: