"We must be thinking of getting back home now, for if we are late for lunch, those Drexel girls will be grinning at each other like a couple of fiends." Rather reluctantly he rose also, and accompanied her. They made their way across a series of rough, bracken-covered knolls projecting into the sea until they reached the little bay that is known as Port Bân; and here, either the beauty and solitude of the place tempted them, or they were determined to defy sarcasm, for instead of hastening home, they quietly strolled up and down the smooth cream-white beach, now and again picking up a piece of rose-red seaweed, or turning over a limpet-shell, or watching a sandpiper making his quick little runs alongside the clear, crisp-curling ripples. They did not speak; they were as silent as the transparent blue shadows that their figures cast on the soft-yielding surface on which they walked. And sometimes Lord Musselburgh seemed inclined to write something, with the point of his stick, on that flawless sand; and then again he desisted; and still they continued silent. She took up a piece of pink seaweed, and began pulling it to shreds. He was standing by, looking on. "Don’t you think," said he at last, "that there should be a good deal of sympathy—a very unusual sympathy—between two people who have come through the same suffering?" "Oh, I suppose so," she said, with affected carelessness—her eyes still bent on the seaweed. "Do you know," said he, again, "that I haven’t the least idea what your name is!" "My name? Oh, my name is Madge," she answered. "Madge?" said he. "I wonder if you make the capital M this way?" and therewith he traced on the sand an ornamental _M_ in the manner of the last century. "No, I don’t," she said, "but it is very pretty. How do you write the rest?" Thus encouraged, he made bold to add the remaining letters, and seemed rather to admire his handiwork when it was done. "By the way," she said, "I don’t know your Christian name either!" "Hubert." "Can you write that in the same fashion?" she suggested, with a simple ingenuousness. So, grown still bolder, he laboriously inscribed his name immediately underneath her own. But that was not all. When he had ended he drew a circle right round both names. "That is a ring to enclose them," said he: and he turned from the scored names to regard her downcast face. "But—but I know a much smaller ring that could bring them still closer together. Will you let me try—Madge?" He took her hand. "Yes," she said, in a low voice. And then—Oh, very well, then: then—but after a reasonable delay—then they left those creamy sands, and went up by the edge of the blue-green turnip-field to the pathway, and so to the iron gate; and as he opened the gate for her, she said—