"You do not love me, do you, Jerry?" she said, and now her voice dropped a good fifth and thrilled like the plucked string of a violoncello, and my nerves vibrated to it and tingled in my wrists. "Roger said you would, and I thought you would--and you do not," she said sadly. I clenched a handful of the moist sand and leaned toward her, my heart pounding furiously. "Are you sorry?" I muttered unsteadily, fixing my eyes on hers. She met them fully. Like great grey pools they were, her eyes, honest as mountain springs, clear as rain. They caught me and held me and drenched me in their innocent, warm sweetness; there was not one thought in her head, not one corner in her heart that I was not free to know. Those eyes had never held a secret since they opened into a world that had never, to her knowledge, deceived her. They swam in light, and oh, the depths on depths of love that one could sound there! My last hateful anchor broke clean off and my heart slipped from the stupid rocks of suspicion and self-protection and jealousy, and floated away on the bosom of that sweet, disturbing flood. I forgot Roger, I forgot what had been myself; in that instant, in the utter surrender of her innocent eyes, she became for me all at once the vision I had seen in the mist again, the thing we mean when we say woman--but now she was one single special woman, the vision and the flesh-and-blood reality together. "Are you sorry?" I said again, and my voice was not my own. She smiled at me till I caught my breath. "Not now, Jerry," she said softly, "because you do love me, now." The sand fell, a tightly moulded shape, out of my hand, and I wrenched my eyes away from her. They smarted and stung, but the pain relieved me and cleared my brain, and I knew suddenly what I have known ever since and shall know till I die. There on the beach, before I had so much as touched her hand, I had fallen senselessly and hopelessly and everlastingly in love with Margarita. CHAPTER X FATE SPREADS AN ISLAND FEAST I don't know how long we sat silent on the beach. Such silence was never embarrassing to her, because it seemed perfectly normal and usual, and I was too busy with my thoughts to feel any sense of restraint. And yet they were hardly thoughts: my head whirled in a confusion of regret and desire, and one moment my blood ran warm with the joy of my discovery, and the next a horrid chill crept over me as I saw my empty years--for if she might not fill them, no one else should. At last I drew a long breath. "Are you hungry?" Margarita asked pleasantly. "When I am hungry I do that very often. If you will come now, we will have our breakfast."