"Oh, yes," she said, and she raised her head, and spoke with a proud and bitter air, "I have my story too! I do not tell it to everyone. Perhaps I have not told it to anyone. But the man I loved was separated from me by lies—by lies; and I was fool and idiot enough to believe them! And the one I told you about—the one with the beautiful, clear, brown eyes—so good and noble he was, as everyone declared!—it was he who came to me with those falsehoods; and I believed them—I believed them—like the fool I was! Oh, yes," she said, and she held her head high, for her breast was heaving with real emotion this time, "it is easy to say that every mistake meets with its own punishment; but I was punished too much—too much; a life-long punishment for believing what lying friends had said to me!" She furtively put the tips of her fingers to her eyes, to wipe away the tears that lay along the lashes. "And then I was mad; I was out of my senses; I would have married anybody to show that—that I cared nothing for—for the other one; and—and I suppose he was angry too—he would not speak—he stood aside, and knew that I was going to kill my life, and never a single word! That was his revenge—to say nothing—when he saw me about to kill my life! Cruel, do you call it? Oh, no!—what does it matter? A woman’s heart broken—what is that? But now you know why I think so of men—and—and why I laugh at them——" Well, her laughing was strange: she suddenly burst into a violent fit of crying and sobbing, and turned away from him, and hid her face in her handkerchief. What could he do? This was all unlike the gay young widow who seemed so proud of her solitary estate and so well content. Feeble words of comfort were of small avail. And then, again, it hardly seemed the proper occasion for offering her more substantial sympathy—though that was in his mind all the while, and very nearly on the tip of his tongue. So perforce he had to wait until her weeping was over; and indeed it was she herself who ended the scene by exclaiming impatiently— "There—enough of that! I did not intend to bother you with my small troubles when I stayed behind for you this morning. Come, shall we go out on to the rocks, and round by the little bay? What do you call it—Ganovan?" "Yes; I think they call it Little Ganovan," he said, absently, as he and she together emerged from the twilight of larch and pine, and proceeded, leisurely and in silence, to cross the semicircular sweep of yellow sand.