And it was not only his personal honour that restrained him, but the honour of love itself; the silence, the gravity which every great service imposes upon those who have borne it; the duty of handing down unsullied, unspoken of, the proud name the brave tradition to those that come after. It was because Love had indeed touched him with its sceptre that he could shield in silence one who had worn its name unworthily even while under it she had stabbed him to the heart. He laid his hand upon the packet to return it to its place. Then, with sudden hesitation and a rueful smile at the sense of his own weakness, he rose and carried it across to the grate. He laid it on the coals and lit a match beneath it; and, as he turned away again towards the window, heard in the blaze his hope and his despair together flame indifferently to the sky. The Measure of a Man I The light shore breeze of a September morning was dying out across the bay. The wide Atlantic beyond it seemed flat as a floor of sapphire inlaid with pale veins of green. The sky was without a cloud; and the sun filled the unstirred silence with a clear golden heat. The high gray cliffs that held the bay, hid, at either end, the land beyond it; half hid even, by a curve of their contour, the entrance to Ballindra River, so that no sign of habitation was to be seen along the shore. The blue spaces of the sea were empty, save for a little lug-rigged boat which had slipped out of the river while the mists still slept upon it, and had spent the morning creeping with each soft breath of air to the northern border of the bay. It was now close to land, so close that the object of its journey could be plainly seen. Before it, cradled, under the cliffs, between the serried ledges of rock, was a tiny beach. It was in shape like a young moon, paved in silvery pink and pearl by milk-white pebbles and delicate shells, with shelving wings of stone thrust out and bent inward from either side into the sea. The long ledges of rock were of a dark lavender, and from them a brilliant yellow weed dripped and swung in the transparent pool of purple and emerald, which throbbed softly against the pearly crescent of the shore. East and west, so far as eye could reach, the sea pushed a sparkling shoulder against the sheer front of the cliffs. Nowhere else in the whole bay was there a foot's breadth of beach, and there was clearly no outlet landwards even from the slender strand towards which the boat was heading. A girl with fair hair and luminous gray eyes was steering, and a man of about thirty sat upon the opposite gunwale with the slack sheet in his hand. She looked up at the flapping leech, and then with a whimsical smile into his face. "You'll have to row in," she said. "Not I," he protested airily; "we're going to sail." She laughed a low contented laugh at his perversity. "Like this?" she enquired, tilting her head at the empty canvas.