Shirley’s warm breath made a little fog against the star-eyed moss. She was scarcely conscious of her wet and clinging clothing, and the soaked strands of her hair. She was so wrapped in her desolation that she no longer heard the sound of the persevering rain and the wet swishing of the bushes—parting now to a hurried step that fell almost without sound on the spongy forest soil. She started up suddenly to see Valiant before her. He was in a somewhat battered walking suit of brown khaki, with a leather belt and a felt hat whose brim, stiff with the wet, was curved down visor-wise over his brow. In an instant he had [Pg 374]drawn her upright, and they stood, looking at each other, drenched and trembling. “How can you?” he said with a roughness that sounded akin to anger. “Here in this atrocious weather—like this!” he laid a hand on her arm. “You’re wet through.” “I—don’t mind the rain,” she answered, drawing away, yet feeling with a guilty thrill the masterfulness of his tone, as well as its real concern. “I’m often wet.” His gaze searched her face, feature by feature, noting her pallor, the blue-black shadows beneath her eyes, the caught breath, uneven like a child’s from crying. He still held her hands in his. “Shirley,” he said, “I know what you intended to tell me by those flowers—I went to St. Andrew’s that night, in the dark, after I read your letter. Who told you? Your—mother?” “No, no!” she cried. “She would never have told me!” His face lighted. With an irresistible movement he caught her to him. “Shirley!” he cried. “It shan’t be! It shan’t, I tell you! You can’t break our lives in two like this! It’s unthinkable.” “No, no!” she said piteously, pushing him from her. “You don’t understand. You are a man, and men—can’t.” “I do understand,” he insisted. “Oh, my darling, my darling! It isn’t right for that spectral [Pg 375]thing to come between us! Why, it belonged to a past generation! However sad the outcome of that duel, it held no dishonor. I know only too well the ruin it brought my father! It’s enough that it wrecked three lives. It shan’t rise again, like Banquo’s ghost to haunt ours! I know what you think—I would love you the more, if I could love you more, for that sweet loyalty—but it’s wrong, dear. It’s wrong!” “It’s the only way.” “Listen. Your mother loves you. If she knew you loved me, she would bear anything rather than have you suffer like this. You say she wouldn’t have told you herself. Why, if my father—” She tore her hands from his and faced him with a cry. “Ah, that is it! You knew your father so little. He was never to you what she is to me. Why, I’ve been all the life she has had. I remember when she mended my dolls, and held me when I had scarlet fever, and sang me the songs the trees sang to themselves at night. I said my prayers at her knee till I was twelve years old. We were never apart a day till I went away to school.” She paused, breathless.