"Yes, but I could come afterwards. . . . Forgive me, Herrick. You may do anything to me if I can only go home for just some days. . . . You may do anything. . . ." "I don't want to do anything, Hesther. No one wishes to do you any harm. But whatever my father wishes that every one must do. It has always been so." She seemed to be seized by an absolute frenzy of fear; Harkness could see her white shadow quivering. It appeared to him as though she caught the man by the arm. Her voice came in little breathless stifled cries, infinitely pitiful to hear. "Please, please, Herrick. I dare not speak to your father. I don't dare. I don't dare. But you--let me go--Oh! let me go--just this once, Herrick. Only this once. I'll only be home for a few days and then I'll come back. Truly I'll come back. I'll just see father and Bobby and then I'll come back. They'll be missing me. I know they will. And I'll be going to a foreign country--such a long way. And they'll be wanting me. Bobby's so young, Herrick, only a baby. He's never had any one to do anything for him but me. . . ." "You should have thought of that before you married me, you cannot leave me now." "I won't leave you. I've never broken my word to any one. I won't break it now. It's only for a few days." "How can you be so selfish, Hesther, as to want to upset every one's plans just for a whim of your own? For myself I don't care. You could go home for ever for all I care. I didn't want to marry any one. But what my father wished had to be." She clung to him then, crying again and again between her sobs: "Oh, let me go home! Let me go home! Let me go home!" Harkness fancied that the man put his hands on her shoulders. His voice, cold, lifeless, impersonal, crossed the room. "That is enough. He is waiting for us downstairs. He will be wondering where we are." The little white shadow seemed to turn to the window, towards the limitless expanse of sunlit sea. Then a voice, small, proud, empty of emotion, said: "Father wished me----" Harkness was once more alone in the room. XIII They had gone but the girl's fear remained. It was there as truly as the two figures had been and its reality was stronger than their reality. Harkness had the sense of having been caught, and it was exactly as though now, as he stood alone there in the gallery staring down into the room, some Imp had touched him on the shoulder, crying, "Now you're in for it! Now you're in for it! The situation has got you now." He was, of course, not "in for it" at all. How many such conversations between human beings there were: it simply was that he had happened against his will to overhear a fragment of one of them. Yes, "against his will." How desperately he wished that he hadn't been there. What induced them to choose that room and that time for their secret confidences? He felt still in the echo of their voices the effect of their urgency.