With a motion too quick for her to escape he stooped and kissed her lightly. To that moment she had pitied him, but his touch she loathed. She thrust him away with both hands. He turned. Without speaking, without looking at her again he walked away. She watched him with a desperate feeling of being abandoned, of losing something powerful and valuable. The faint, thin screech of a locomotive from a station far down the line made him pause, and turn, and gaze under his hand in the strong sun. So for a moment she saw him, a lowering, peering figure moving away from her over the lawn between broad flower-beds. Then he disappeared among the shrubbery. This encounter, that had stopped her in full open field, had not been the fatal thing she had feared. It had been a peril met that nerved her to a higher courage. Now she could walk gallantly to the most uncertain moment of her life. Between the glimmering willows down the long still avenue she passed, her flowing draperies borne backwards as by triumphant airs. The wind of her approach seemed to reach the two still far in front of her. They turned and watched her drawing nearer, and before she had quite reached them Kerr stretched out his hand as if to help her over a last rough place, and drew her toward him and held her beside him with his fingers lightly clasped around her wrist. She saw that he looked pale, worn, as he had not been last night, and, what struck her most strangely, angry. The hand that held hers shook with the violent pulse that was beating in it. He turned to Clara. "Will you pardon us, Mrs. Britton?" Then after another patient moment, "Miss Gilsey has something to say to me." Still he made no motion to move away, and at last Clara seemed to understand what was expected of her. She flushed, and in the middle of that color her eyes flashed double steel. For the first time in Flora's memory she was at a loss. She passed them without a word. Kerr looked after the little brilliant figure, moving daintily away through sun and shadow, with deep disgust in his face. But when he turned to Flora disgust lifted to high severity. It was she who appeared the guilty one, and he the accuser. "Why didn't you come, last night?" "I couldn't. _He_ was there, Harry, outside my door." "In God's name! What did you tell him?" "Nothing. We did not speak--but I couldn't get past him!" The suspicion in his face was more than she could bear. "You must believe me--for, if you don't, we're both lost!" He had her by both wrists, now, and gently made her face him. "I have believed in you to the extent of coming alone to a place I know nothing of, because you wanted me. Now that I am here, what is it you have to say to me?" "Oh, nothing more than I have said before," she pleaded; "only that, ten times more earnestly."