"What have you been doing since I left you here--so jealously guarded? I thought I had lost you altogether. I wrote, but my letter came back to me." "Did you write?" Her eyes met his with a light of gladness in them. "I thought--that was only talk." "Did you?" His manner was faintly reproachful. "I had no idea you would leave Mrs Graham so soon, or I'd have written before." Brenda suddenly smiled. "Neither had I," she said. "It was not exactly voluntary." "You don't mean," he began quickly, and stopped, regarding her perplexedly. "I've wondered," he added somewhat lamely after a pause, "since getting my letter back, whether you had any trouble that night? It wasn't, I hope, in any way due to our intercourse that you lost your post?" She laughed, and he thought her mirth the sweetest and most infectious he had ever heard. He laughed with her. "Oh Lord!" he said. "Don't tell me it was that." "Mrs Graham waited up for me," she confessed, "and the others got back first and admitted I hadn't gone with them. She was--oh! so angry... There was a man who boarded there who was sorry for me; and he secured me my present position at the cafe. It helped at the time, but of course it's a step down." "It's a drop, yes," he admitted. "I'm awfully sorry. You must climb again. Life is always; climbing." "It is easier to drop a step than to climb one," she returned. "That isn't your philosophy really," he insisted. "I know you have encouraged me in believing that the greater the difficulty the more exhilarating and better worth the effort is its surmounting. It's up to you to practise what you preach." "Ah!" she said, and her voice sounded a little weary. "I must have been a horrid little prig when I talked to you like that." "You were never priggish," he asserted. "But you keep a man up to the mark." They walked on for a while in silence, and still in silence made their way down to the shore, scrambling with difficulty over the slippery rocks. When they came upon a stretch of sand he called a halt. They seated themselves close together on the sand, and he took his coat and put it about both their shoulders. "The nights turn in chilly," he said. "Do you remember how hot it was when we sat here before?" "Yes," she replied, and drew closer to him. "Everything seems changed," she said,--"even you--you, perhaps, most of all." "I know I am changed," he allowed. "I've been through a good deal since I saw you..." He could not, he discovered, tell her then the nature of the thing which had changed him. He had meant to, but when he tried to express himself he could not find the words. "I've been through a good deal," he repeated. He played with the cold damp sand, and his manner became more aloof, less intimate and confidential. "Life changes most of us." "Because life hurts," she said. He looked at her closely, recalling the bright girlishness of her when last they had talked together.