‘Yes, yes,’ she murmured, ‘I am sorry.’ After a moment she added: ‘Now that he’s dead I’ll make a confession, Jim, that I have never made to a soul. If he had pressed me—which he did not—to go with him when I was in the carriage that night beside his yacht, I would have gone. And I was disappointed that he did not press me.’ ‘Suppose he were to suddenly appear now, and say in a voice of command, “Margery, come with me!”’ ‘I believe I should have no power to disobey,’ she returned, with a mischievous look. ‘He was like a magician to me. I think he was one. He could move me as a loadstone moves a speck of steel . . . Yet no,’ she added, hearing the infant cry, ‘he would not move me now. It would be so unfair to baby.’ ‘Well,’ said Jim, with no great concern (for ‘_la jalousie rétrospective_,’ as George Sand calls it, had nearly died out of him), ‘however he might move ’ee, my love, he’ll never come. He swore it to me: and he was a man of his word.’ _Midsummer_, 1883.