'Oh no; why should we?' she asked, in her sweetest tone. 'I am,' she thought, 'in reality--but for the encumbrances on his estate--nothing more to him than all the other girls he has talked to, laughed with, and flirted with, as his cold hard mother told me. So let me be on my guard--on my guard!' 'You will--most probably--be married before I return, if I ever return at all, which God only can foresee,' he said. 'I may never marry,' said Bella, with a curious ring in her voice. 'But you _will_ think of me, Bella, won't you--broiling and fighting in far away Africa--won't you? I would not like to think that you quite forgot me.' 'Nor shall I,' said she, making a super-human effort to repress her tears. 'Good-bye.' 'Good-bye.' He was gone--gone, and no kiss was exchanged between those two--only a clinging pressure of the hand, and that was all! Could it be that, after all, he was no more to her--through her misconception and doubt of him--than a stick or a stone? If her assumed calm covered--as it really did--a sore, sore heart, how was he to know it? With her hands interlaced above her head, as if to stay the throbbing of her brain, and her swelling eyes cast upward, she said, in a husky voice, 'If I have erred, oh! may heaven protect him, and make his life happy in some other way!' However, she did not say with another. When Jerry was fairly gone, it seemed to Bella that an unnatural stillness--a hush fell over all the house. She threw open a window to court the cool atmosphere, for her temples were hot and quivering; she could hear the murmur of the stream and the rustle of the trees, in shadow now, as the sun had crept round to the back of the house, and a gloom was falling on the landscape, even as a gloom was sinking on her heart; and she began to upbraid herself with hardness and cruelty, and to feel she might never know rest again. And Jerry's voice lingered in her ears, as the expression of his face clung to her memory, and, in a sudden revulsion of feeling, she wailed in her heart-- 'Oh, he is going away, and I have acted a cruel part to him--away to face death, and our parting seems like a farewell of the dying; and his love for me may be true, tender, and honest, after all! If so, what will he--what must he think of me? But it is over and done with--over and done with now!' And she took refuge in floods of bitter, bitter tears. When, for good or for evil, for love and for peace, should she see Jerry Wilmot again? Too probably, never more! CHAPTER VIII. THE GAME THAT TWO CAN PLAY.