"I want you to be angry," she said. "You ought to be angry. I was angry with you. That is what I am sorry for. It is all that I am sorry for, but I am very, very sorry for it. I ought to love you--I promised to love you; I thought I did love you, and if ever a man deserved to be loved, you deserve it. And yet I don't love you. I can't! Oh, I'll come back with you. I can't live with you as your wife, but I'll live with you. If you want me to, we can start right away." But Stainton would not yet hear of that. "Wait," he said, "wait. Perhaps we can think of something. Perhaps something will turn up." Jim put out a hand, a hand grown thin and heavily veined since his marriage, and timidly patted her arm. "My poor little girl!" he whispered. "My poor little child!" "No, no!" she said, drawing away. "You must hate me!" "I could never do that, Muriel." "But you have to! Think of it: I don't love you--you, my husband--and I do--I do----" The words that had come so easily by night and in anger she dared not utter here in calmness and by day. But Stainton supplied: "You do love him?" She bowed her dark head in assent. "You are very sure?" he asked. "Very, very sure." "So that it was not"--he hesitated as if he knew that he had no right to put the question--"it was not merely passion?" Muriel looked straight into his eyes. "It was so far from merely passion," she answered, "that I have only twice even so much as kissed him." Stainton believed her now. His hand dropped from her arm. It seemed to him that she would have hurt him less had her love for von Klausen been baser. There was a long pause. "I see," said Stainton at last; and again: "I see." He looked up at the high cliff bending far above them. "And--von Klausen," he presently pursued--"you will let me ask it, won't you? In a moment you will see that I have a good reason. You are sure that his love for you is--is of the same sort that yours is for him?" "Quite." "Why?" "On the same evidence." "I see. I had begun to think so this morning. He came to see me." She gave a short cry. "Is he hurt?" she asked. "Why should I hurt him? It is not his fault that he has hurt me. No, I didn't hurt him; I merely came by train to Aubagne, and thence here by motor-bus, to learn--what I have learned; and to say--what I am about to say." "You told him where I was?" "I did not name the place. I simply said that you had gone away, leaving a note in which you told me that you were bound for a certain secluded spot to be alone." Muriel clasped her white hands in distress. "He will guess," she said. "He will guess from that. It was he told me of this place--told me only the other day in much those words." Stainton smiled a little. "I fancied he would guess," said he: "I intended that he should." "But he will follow!" "No doubt." "You--you--why do you speak so?" "He can't get a convenient train from Marseilles, so he will probably come the whole way by motor."