"No," she said a trifle sharply. "As I told you last time, that is all done with now. It was a little weak of me to see you, and you must not come here again." The colour faded in the young man's face, and he clenched his hands spasmodically. "Oh!" he said, with a catch in his breath, "you can't mean it, Carrie. In spite of what you told me, I had been trying to believe the thing was out of the question." There was pain in Carrie Denham's face, and a little bitter smile flickered into her eyes. "The thing one shrinks from most is generally the one that happens--unless one does something to make it impossible," she said. The man reddened, for, though he was pleasant to look at, a stalwart, open-faced Englishman, he was very young, and it was, perhaps, not his fault that there was a lack of stiffness in his composition. He was not one to grapple resolutely with an emergency, and Carrie Denham, who had once looked up to him, realised it then. "What could I do--what could anybody in my place do?" he said, with a little gesture that suggested desperation. "Stanley Crossthwaite is only sixty, and may live another twenty years. While he does, I'm something between his head keeper and a pensioner." "Isn't it a pity you didn't think of that earlier?" The man made as though he would have seized her hands again, but she drew back from him with a slight shiver of hopelessness running through her. "You can't blame me," he said. "Who could help falling in love with you? There was a time when I think you loved me, too." Carrie watched him with a quietness at which she herself marvelled. She had, at least, fancied she felt for him what he had protested he felt for her, but now there was a stirring of contempt in her. Her reason recognised that he was right, and there was nothing he could do; but, for all that, he had been her last faint hope, and he had failed her. "There is nothing to be gained by talking of that now," she said quietly. The man, who did not answer her, leaned upon the rails, gazing down into the ravine with his face awry, until at last he looked up again. "It's not that awful brute Aylmer?" he said hoarsely. "No. I could not have brought myself to that." "The farmer fellow? It's horrible, anyway, but I suppose one couldn't blame you--they, your father and Jimmy, made you." He straightened himself suddenly and moved along the path a pace or two. "It's an abominable thing that you should be driven to such a sacrifice, but you shall not make it. Can't you understand? It's out of the question. You can't make it. Is there nothing you can do?"