"If she were an ordinary sort of girl it wouldn't matter so much," he thought--"She would be practical, with sufficient vanity not to care,--she would see more comedy than tragedy in the whole thing. But with her romantic ideas about love, and her name in everybody's mouth, I might have got into the devil's own mess! I wonder where she went to when she left the studio? Straight home, I suppose, to Miss Leigh,--will she tell Miss Leigh? No--I think not!--she's not likely to tell anybody. She'll keep it all to herself. She's a silly little fool!--but she's--she's loyal!" Yes, she was loyal! Of that there could be no manner of doubt. Callous and easy-going man of the world as he had ever been and ever would be, the steadfast truth and tender devotion of the poor child moved him to a faint sense of shamed admiration. On the inky blackness of the night he saw her face, floating like a vision,--her little uplifted, praying hands,--he heard her voice, piteously sweet, crying "Amadis! Amadis! Say you didn't mean it!--say it isn't true!--I thought you loved me, dear!--you told me so!" The waves hissed round the rolling steamer, and every now and again white tongues of foam darted at him from the crests of the heaving waters, yet amid all the shattering roar and turbulence of the storm, he could not get the sound of that pleading voice out of his ears. "Silly little fool!" he repeated over and over again with inward vexation--"Nothing could be more absurd than her way of looking at life as though it was only made for love! Yet--she suited her name!--she was really the most 'innocent' creature I have ever known! And--and--she loved me!" The sea and the wind shrieked at him as the vessel plunged heavily on her difficult way--his nerves, cool as they were, seemed to himself on edge: and at certain moments during that Channel passage he felt a pang of remorse and pity for the young life on which he had cast an ineffaceable shadow,--a life instinct with truth, beauty, and brightness, just opening out as it were into the bloom of fulfilled promise. He had not "betrayed" her in the world's vulgar sense of betrayal,--he had not wronged her body--but he had done far worse,--he had robbed her of her peace of mind. Little by little he had stolen from the flower of her life its honey of sweet content,--he had checked the active impulses of her ambition, and as they soared upwards like bright birds to the sun, had brought them down, to the ground, slain with a mere word of light mockery,--he had led her to judge all things of no value save himself,--and when he had attained to this end he had destroyed her last dream of happiness by voluntarily proving his own insincerity and worthlessness.