"Poor loyal soul!" said Jim Airth, greatly moved. "Myra, if _I_ got accidentally done for, as Ingleby was,--should _you_ feel so, for my sake?" "No!" cried Myra, passionately. "If I lost _you_, my belovèd, I should never want to touch any other man's hand, in friendship or otherwise, as long as I lived!" "Ah," mused Jim Airth. "Then you don't consider Lady Ingleby's reason for her decision proved a love such as ours?" Myra laid her beautiful head against his shoulder. "Jim," she said, brokenly, "I do not feel myself competent to discuss any other love. One thing only is clear to me;--I never realised what love meant, until I knew _you_." A long silence in the honeysuckle arbour. Then Jim Airth cried almost fiercely to the woman in his arms: "Can you really think you have been right to keep me waiting, even for a day?" And she who loved him with a love beyond expression could frame no words in answer to that question. Thus it came to pass that, in the days to come, it was there, unanswered; ready to return and beat upon her brain with merciless reiteration: "Was I right to keep him waiting, even for a day." * * * * * In the hall, beside the marble table, where lay the visitors' book, they paused to say good-night. From the first, Myra had never allowed him up the stairs until her door was closed. "If you don't keep the rules I think it right to make, Jim," she had said, with her little tender smile, "I shall, in self-defence, engage Miss Murgatroyd as chaperon; and what sort of a time would you have then?" So Jim was pledged to remain below until her door had been shut five minutes. After which he used to tramp up the stairs whistling: "A long long life, to my sweet wife, And mates at sea; And keep our bones from Davy Jones, Where'er we be. And may you meet a mate as sweet----" Then his door would bang, and Myra would venture to give vent to her suppressed laughter, and to sing a soft little "Yeo ho! we go!--Yeo ho! Yeo ho!" for sheer overflowing happiness. But this was the last evening. A parting impended. Also there had been tense moments in the honeysuckle arbour. Jim's blue eyes were mutinous. He stood holding her hands against his breast, as he had done in Horseshoe Cove, when the waves swept round their feet, and he had cried: "You _must_ climb!" "So to-morrow night," he said, "you will be at the Lodge, Shenstone; and I, at my Club in town. Do you know how hard it is to be away from you, even for an hour? Do you realise that if you had not been so obstinate we never need have been parted at all? We could have gone away from here, husband and wife together. If you had really cared, you wouldn't have wanted to wait." Myra smiled up into his angry eyes.