"Give it to me, Paul. You are thinking of the boy; but we could bring him up, you and I, if you would have it so. Paul! This is my reward at last! I can do this for you, now that I am rich." But still his fingers resisted faintly, and there was a pause, a long pause. Then the hand which lay in his seemed to slacken, to lie in his like a dead hand, and her voice came with a sob in its softness: "Paul! do this for me, and I will ask no more. Paul! let me save you--save you and Marjory!" It was her last plea. She had kept it back till now, hoping against hope, and, as she made it, she touched the highest point of self-forgetfulness it is possible for a woman to reach. But in touching it she struck a false note in the syren's song, and Paul Macleod's hand closed like a vice over his one tie to an honest life--the letter. The name had roused him. "Marjory!" he echoed absently. Then he turned and looked at his companion compassionately, yet decisively. "You mean to be kind, Violet, but you don't understand," he said quietly; then raised her little slack hand, stooped to kiss it, and left her so, standing by the fire alone. She had played for her love boldly, skilfully, and she had lost. She had tried to save Paul for his own sake, and she had failed. Yet even so, the innate courage of the woman faced the facts without a tear, without a complaint. "It is my own fault," she said, half aloud. "I ought to have burnt the letter long ago, but I was not meant for that sort of thing. My heart is too soft." Then she smiled a little bitterly. It was at the remembrance of Paul Macleod's assertion, "You do not understand!" If she did not understand him, who could? CHAPTER XXVI. Nearly a month had gone by since Marjory Carmichael had whispered to the darkness, "Come back to me, Paul, and we will forget our love." The sudden awakening to the realities, not only of life but of her own nature, caused by his reckless avowal of love, had passed, as all awakenings must, into calm acquiescence in the commonplace facts of consciousness. There was no denying of the truth possible to her clear sight, and as she sate on the last day of October, on the last day of holiday before she and little Paul set off together to make acquaintance with a new world, she laid down her pen in the middle of a sentence in the letter she was writing to Tom Kennedy, and looked out over the stormy whitecrested waves of the loch set in its rampart of grey, snow-powdered, mist-shrouded hills, and wondered how she could have been so blind for so long. Blind to half the great problems of life! And then, with a smile, infinitely sweeter than it used to be because infinitely stronger, she took up a letter which lay beside her, and leaning back in her chair began to read it over again, just as she had re-read a letter down by the river side three months before, on the day when her holiday began--on the day when she had first seen Paul Macleod.