"Anything is better than marrying without love," he said, but he said it half-heartedly. How was a decent man to throw over a charming devoted girl to whom he was to be married in a fortnight, shaming her before all her little world after he had sought and won her? He thought of Laura's soft acquiescence with an agony of self-reproach and impatience. Then he heard Caroline speaking again, her voice low and clear with the murmur of the sea running in and out of it--he felt it go to his heart. "It's too late to begin to think whether you'll be miserable or not now," she said. "You made her fond of you. It was your own doing. And you wouldn't get me if you did give her up. I'd no more take you from her, now she's got her wedding-dress and all, than I'd stick a knife into a baby sleeping in its pram. She worships you--can't you see that? It would spoil all her life." "What about yours--and mine?" he said. "You don't really care for me, or you couldn't talk like that." She looked away to the glimmering sea, not troubling to answer him. What was the use? He knew. "Well, I'll be getting on," she said at last. But he found the hopelessness in her voice unbearable. "Carrie, we can't leave it like this," he said. "I can't do without you; that's a fact. We must arrange something." He hesitated. "You--you won't cease to be friends with me just because I'm married, will you?" She moved so quickly out of the reach of his hand that she stood poised on the extreme edge of the cliff. "What do you mean?" she said fiercely. "Is that what you take me for? Then let me tell you I never carried on with a married man in my life and never shall. You're as good as married now. Leave me alone. You think you can talk to me like that because I'm fond of you. But before I'd have anything to do with those underhand ways, I'd jump over this cliff and have done with it. I would, too. I aren't _that_ sort, you know--though I have behaved like a silly fool." But her very defiance only gave his curiosity a keener edge, and he moved towards her with his hand outstretched. "You won't get out of it like that," he said. "Do you suppose I'm going to let you go now, and never see you alone again? I will see you, or I'll chuck the whole thing up to-morrow morning, come what may." She glanced at him sideways, temporizing: "I shall be meeting you, no doubt." But he was not to be deceived. "You mean you have done with me unless I break off my engagement. Very well. I'll do it." She shook her head. "That's nonsense," she said sharply. "You know you can't do it." "It is only what you did yourself," he said sullenly. "You threw over that young man I saw you with at the dance, and I don't suppose you considered it a crime." They spoke as enemies, throwing the barbed words back and forth. "Of course I didn't." "But why not? It was the same thing." "No; that was quite different," she said. "I don't see it. Why different?"