"I do not know; it is like the Green Ray, something to dream about." "To dream about! Ah! that sort of marriage is, I own, beyond the vision of ordinary humanity." "But indeed there is nothing scientifically impossible in the Green Ray. You have only to get the angle of refraction equal to the----" "Spare me, please. If I have to swallow romance I prefer it undisguised. Even as a boy I refused powders in jam." "Wish I had," grumbled Will, knocking the ashes out of his pipe. "I have never been able to eat black-currant jelly in consequence. And it is awfully nice in itself. Come, Marjory, we ought to be going." "It is very hard to get rid of acquired tastes," muttered Paul, in an undertone, as he rose, and quite familiarly held out his hand to help Marjory to her feet also. "For instance, it will be difficult to forget the flavour of the past fortnight." "Why should you forget it?" They were standing apart from the others, who were looking eastward to see if the boatmen were ready. "Because the pleasure of it has been demoralising." "I don't believe in the demoralising effect of pleasure." "Perhaps not. You are one of the virtuously constituted whose pleasure consists in behaving nicely. Mine doesn't." Her hand went out in an impulsive gesture of denial. "Why should you say that? You are not----" "How can you know what I am?" he began bitterly, yet indifferently; his eyes, not upon her, but fixed far on the distant horizon, as if arraigning some unseen power which had made him what he was. Then he paused abruptly, and infinite surprise drove everything else from his face. "Look!" he cried. "Look?--what?--where?" "Look!" His hand was on hers now, and its trembling touch seemed to give her sight. It was a new heaven and a new earth! For, on the outermost edge of the world, the last beam of light from the sunken sun shot through the waves, flooding sky, and sea, and shore, with a green light, soft and pellucid as the heart of an emerald. But only for an instant. The next he had loosed her hand and the light was gone. "What are you staring at so, Miss Carmichael?" His mocking tone jarred her through and through. She looked at him in sheer bewilderment. "The--the Green Ray!" "The Green Ray!" he echoed, in the same tones. "I say, Cameron! Here is your cousin declaring she has seen the Green Ray. Did you see anything?" "Only the seal you were watching out on the rocks yonder," called Will. "Splendid shot, wasn't it?" "The Green Ray!" echoed the Reverend James, bustling up. "Dear me, how interesting, and I missed it, somehow. What was it like, Miss Marjory?" The girl stood with her clear, cold eyes fixed on Paul's face. "I scarcely know. You had better ask Captain Macleod. If I saw anything, he saw it also; and saw it first!"