But Charnock did not follow her. He remained where she left him, and her feet loitered more with every step she took. At the edge of the window she stopped. For the second time that evening she became aware that one way or other she must do the irrevocable thing. It was a mere step to make across the sill of the window, from the stone of the balcony to the parquet of the ball-room floor,--a thing insignificant in itself and in its consequences most momentous. She stood for a second undecided. The sight of her partner looking about the room decided her. She came back to where Charnock stood in a soldierly rigidity. "You might have come half-way to meet me," she said in a whimsical complaint, and then very gently: "I will hear what you wish to say, if you will still say it." "What I mean is this," he replied; "it is what I was trying to say. The hardest thing, if one ever wants help, is--don't you think?--the asking for it. I could not say that to you until I had hit upon a means by which the asking, should it ever be necessary, might be dispensed with. And it seemed to me that there was something providential in my tearing that glove; for that torn glove can be the means, if ever you see fit to use it. You live at Ronda; for the next year I am to be found at Algeciras; you will only have to send that torn glove to me in an envelope. I shall know without a word from you; and when I answer it by coming up to you at Ronda, it will be understood by both of us, again without a word, why I have come. I shall not need to speak at all; you will only need to say the precise particular thing which needs to be done." Miranda stood with her eyelids closed, and her ungloved hand pressed over her heart. The blood darkened her cheeks. Charnock saw her whole face soften and sweeten. "I understand," she said in a low voice. "I might appeal and be spared the humiliation of appealing, like the face in your mirror." "I believe," said he, "that my mirror sent me a message on that night. I have tried to deliver it." Miranda slowly raised her eyes and they glistened with something other than the starlight. "Thank you," she said; "for the delicacy of the thought I am most grateful. What woman would not be? But I do not think that I shall ever send you the glove: not because I would not be glad to owe gratitude to you, but just for the same reason which has kept me from telling you anything of my troubles. Such as they are I must fight them through by myself." This time she passed over the sill into the ballroom; but she was holding the glove tight against her breast, and she had a feeling that Charnock very surely knew that at some time she would send it to him. CHAPTER VI WHILE CHARNOCK BUILDS CASTLES IN SPAIN, MIRANDA RETURNS THERE