She lifted a tear-stained face and held out her hand’ to him silently. He patted her hand gently, as one pats the hand of a child. “Is—is it so bad, little girl? Do you care for him so much?” “Better than my life!” she said. “Oh, if you knew!” “I see,” he said quietly. He sat staring at the green waters, stirred now and again by the fin of a lazy carp. He realised that there would be no sweet girlish, golden-haired little mistress for Hurst Dormer, and the realisation hurt him badly. The girl seemed to have crept a little closer to him, as for comfort and protection. “She has made up her mind, and nothing will change it. She wants you to—to marry me. She’s told me so a hundred times. She won’t listen to anything else; she says you—you care for me, Hugh.” “Supposing I care so much, little girl, that I want your happiness above everything in this world. Supposing—I clear out?” he said—“clear right away, go to Africa, or somewhere or other?” “She would make me wait till you came back, and you’d have to come back, Hugh, because there is always Hurst Dormer. There’s no way out for me, none. If only—only you were married; that is the only thing that would have saved me!” “But I’m not!” She sighed. “If only you were, if only you could say to her, ‘I can’t ask Marjorie to marry me, because I am already married!’ It sounds rubbish, doesn’t it, Hugh; but if it were only true!” “Supposing—I did say it?” “Oh, Hugh, but—” She looked up at him quickly. “But it would be a lie!” “I know, but lies aren’t always the awful things they are supposed to be—if one told a lie to help a friend, for instance, such a lie might be forgiven, eh?” “But—” She was trembling; she looked eagerly into his eyes, into her cheeks had come a flush, into her eyes the brightness of a new, though as yet vague, hope. “It—it sounds so impossible!” “Nothing is actually impossible. Listen, little maid. She sent me here to you to talk sense, as she put it. That meant she sent me here to ask you to marry me, and I meant to do it. I think perhaps you know why”—he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it—“but I shan’t now, I never shall. Little girl, we’re going to be what we’ve always been, the best and truest of friends, and I’ve got to find a way to help you and Tom—” “Hugh, if you told her that you were married, and not free, she wouldn’t give another thought to opposing Tom and me—it is only because she wants me to marry you that she opposes Tom! Oh, Hugh, if—if—if you could, if it were possible!” She was trembling with excitement, and the sweet colour was coming and going in her cheeks. “Supposing I did it?” he said, and spoke his thoughts aloud. “Of course it would be a shock to her, perhaps she wouldn’t believe!” “She would believe anything you said...”