His thoughts suddenly turned to the girl by his side. He looked at her pityingly,--looked at her, too, with curiosity. She had accepted his coming almost as a matter of course. All the time, though he had known well that she was suffering, she had been wordless, as though her grief were something so great that no outward sign of it could be anything else but pitifully inadequate. In her quiet, graceful walk, the very reserve, the negativeness, so to speak, of her coloring, her speech, her looks, she still represented to him an insoluble enigma. Was it possible, now that her brother had gone, that she would speak? In any case, the silence between them could not continue much longer, for already they were down on the marshes, and, as though by common consent, had turned seaward, towards where the lonely gray tower stood out on its little sandy eminence. "Tell me, Miss Rowan," he said, "what are your plans now?" "My plans?" she repeated, without turning her head. "Yes!" he went on. "I know that your brother's death is a blow to you, but remember that it was inevitable. It was a thing which was bound to come, and in many ways it was kinder and better that it should happen like this. You could not have chosen for him a more peaceful ending, a more peaceful resting-place. For anyone with even the faintest beliefs in the future life could anything be more beautiful than to rest there, with the eternal lullaby of the sea in his ears, free from encroachment, save the encroachment of nature herself?" She turned to look at him, and the calm scrutiny of her level gray eyes somehow disturbed him. "It is easy for you to talk like that," she said. "You are still young and strong, and if the pendulum of fate swings against you one day, it pays you back the next. You are selfish because you cannot help it. You cannot even realize the hideousness of death! You cannot realize it because it comes to other people, and not to you!" "You are a little unfair, Miss Rowan," Deane answered. "You must remember that your brother was a doomed man." "Yes, but why?" she cried. "He was younger than you. There were no worse things in his life. Always he was battling with failure and disappointment. And this is the end,--to sit opposite a doctor, and be told you may live a month, three months, a measure of time. Oh! it's easy to think about it for other people! Think of yourself going about with the knowledge in your heart that as the days passed one by one they brought you nearer to the end, that every morning when your eyes opened, instead of the joy of life would come once more that terrible fear." "Your brother was not a coward, Miss Rowan," Deane said. "A coward! You mean that he did not show his sufferings!" she exclaimed. "That does not mean that he did not suffer. Oh! I have heard him in the night when he thought that he was alone, I have heard his agony. And that is the end!"