"Will you, Maryon?" She shook her head and the eyes she raised to his were full of a dumb, hopeless misery. "I don't think anything could ever make me--happy. But I'd have gone on . . . I'd have borne it . . . if Uncle David were still here. What we are going to do would have hurt him so"--and her voice trembled. "But he's gone, and now nothing seems to matter very much." A sudden overwhelming tenderness for this pain-racked, desolate spirit surged up in Maryon's heart. "You poor little child!" he murmured. "You poor child!" And gathering her into his arms he held her closely, leaning his cheek against her hair, with no passion, but with a swift, understanding sympathy that sprang from the best that was in the man. She clung to him forlornly, so tired and hopeless she no longer felt any impulse to resist him. She had tried--tried to withstand him and to go on treading the uphill path that lay before her. But now she had come to the end of her strength. She would go away with Maryon . . . go out of it all . . . and somewhere, perhaps, together they would build up a new and happier life. Dimly at the back of her mind floated the memory of Peter's words: "But there's honour, dear, and duty . . ." She crushed down the remembrance resolutely. If she were going away into a new world with Maryon, the door of memory must be closed fast. CHAPTER XXXII THE GREEN CAR The atmosphere still held the chill of early morning as Sandy emerged, vigorous and glowing and amazingly hungry, from his daily swim in the sea. He dressed quickly in a small tent erected on the shore and then, whistling cheerfully and with his towel slung over his shoulders, took his way up the beach to where his bicycle stood propped against a boulder. A few minutes' pedalling brought him into St. Wennys, where he dismounted to buy a packet of "gaspers" dispensed by the village postmistress. It was a quaint little village, typical of the West Country, with its double row of small houses climbing the side of a steep hill capped at the summit by an ancient church of weather-beaten stone. The bright June sunshine winked against the panes, of the cottage windows and flickered down upon the knobby surface of the cobbled pavements, while in the dust of the wide road an indiscriminate group of children and dogs played joyously together. The warning hoot of a motor-horn sent them scuttling to the side of the road, and, as Sandy smilingly watched the grubby little crowd's hasty flight for safety, a big green car shot by and was swiftly lost to sight in a cloud of whirling dust. But not before Sandy's keen eyes had noted its occupants. "Nan and the artist fellow!" he muttered. Then, remembering that Nan had promised to go with him that afternoon for a run in the "stink-pot," he stepped out into the middle of the street and stood staring up the broad white road along which the car had disappeared--the great road which led to London.