"I shouldn’t, if I were you," said Rosamond; and then she held up a spray. "See, the poor flower, all stained, all fallen apart, all broken. Never draw away the secret supports, Baby. It is better to hold one’s head up, even with the iron in one’s heart, and pretend it is not there." Bethune looked at her, a little startled. In some scarcely tangible way the words seemed aimed at him; but he saw that for her, at that moment, he did not exist. For the first time a pang of real misgiving shot through him. He seemed to behold her with new eyes. She struck him as very frail. Could it be true, or did he but imagine it, that that lovely head, once so defiantly uplifted against him, now drooped? Feeling the fixity of his gaze upon her, she glanced up and then smiled. Strange being! Was he, then, so easily forgiven? His heart gave a sudden leap. The memory of this first evening was one which haunted him all his life with a curious intimate sweetness. * * * * * Time passed as time will pass on board ship; vague hours resembling each other, dropping to dreamy length of days; days that yet lapse quickly and moreover work a sure but subtle change. No traveller that lands after a long sea journey is the same as he who started. Sometimes, indeed, he will look back upon his former self as upon another, with surprise. So it was with Raymond Bethune; and if he came to view himself with surprise, still more inexplicable to him was the new Lady Gerardine as he learned to regard her. According to his presentiment, these two women—she to whose puzzling personality he had vowed antipathy, and she whose fresh young presence made dangerously strong demands upon his sympathy—soon began to absorb all the energies of his thoughts. To a man who had hitherto known no other emotion, outside a very ordinary type of home affection, than friendship for another man; whose life, with the exception of one brief period of glamorous hero-worship, had been devoted to duty in its sternest, most virile form, this mental pre-occupation over two women, both comparative strangers, was at first a matter for self-mockery. It was afterwards one of self-conflict. Whoso, however, has reached the point of actually combating an idea is already and obviously its victim, and the final stage of abandonment to the obsession cannot be very distant.