"How can you be so selfish, Hesther, as to want to upset every one's plans just for a whim of your own? For myself I don't care. You could go home for ever for all I care. I didn't want to marry any one. But what my father wished had to be." 

 She clung to him then, crying again and again between her sobs: 

 "Oh, let me go home! Let me go home! Let me go home!" 

 Harkness fancied that the man put his hands on her shoulders. His voice, cold, lifeless, impersonal, crossed the room. 

 "That is enough. He is waiting for us downstairs. He will be wondering where we are." 

 The little white shadow seemed to turn to the window, towards the limitless expanse of sunlit sea. Then a voice, small, proud, empty of emotion, said: 

 "Father wished me——" 

 Harkness was once more alone in the room. 

XIII

 They had gone but the girl's fear remained. It was there as truly as the two figures had been and its reality was stronger than their reality. 

 Harkness had the sense of having been caught, and it was exactly as though now, as he stood alone there in the gallery staring down into the room, some Imp had touched him on the shoulder, crying, "Now you're in for it! Now you're in for it! The situation has got you now." 

 He was, of course, not "in for it" at all. How many such conversations between human beings there were: it simply was that he had happened against his will to overhear a fragment of one of them. Yes, "against his will." How desperately he wished that he hadn't been there. What induced them to choose that room and that time for their secret confidences? He felt still in the echo of their voices the effect of their urgency. 

 They had chosen that room because there was some one watching their every movement and they had had only a few moments. The child—for surely she could not be more—had almost driven her companion into that two minutes' conversation, and Harkness could realise how desperate she must have been to have taken such a course. 

 But after all it was no business of 

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