"What is it?" she faltered. "What have I done?" With an immense effort he seemed to recover himself. "Nothing," he returned harshly. "Only reminded me that a man is a double fool who tempts Providence a second time." Ann quivered as though he had struck her. "I--I don't understand," she said, her voice hardly; more than a mere thread of sound. He gave a short laugh. "Don't you? Will you understand if I tell you this--that I'm shut out from the 'happy garden' by the gates of memory, now and always." She made no answer. For the moment she was physically unable to reply. But she understood--oh, yes, she understood quite well. He had repented that short, poignantly sweet moment of last night, repudiated all that it implied. He did not trust her--did not believe in her! And he was telling her in just so many words. The revulsion of feeling left her stunned and dazed. She had been so entirely happy--had already given herself in spirit in response to his unspoken demand, and now with a single roughly uttered phrase he had closed the gates--those unyielding gates of memory--and thrust her outside. And then her pride came to her aid. He should never know--never guess--how he had hurt her. With the pluck that is born of race, she smiled at him quite naturally. "Well, you needn't have closed your gates so hard on my wee bit of heliotrope! Look, you've crushed it completely!" She pointed to where it lay, broken and bruised, between them. He picked it up, and tossed it aside--a poor little corpse of heliotrope. "I'll get you another piece," he said shortly. "No, no!" she checked him, laughing. "We shall have that alarming-looking gardener on our track if we steal any more! Mr. Tempest says he doesn't even allow him to pick his own flowers. Let's join the others, and escape from the wrath to come." It was pluckily done, and when they rejoined the rest of the party few would have suspected from her insouciant manner that she and Eliot Coventry had been engaged upon anything more heart-searching than a botanical discussion. But that night Ann lay wakeful until the pale streamers of dawn fanned out across the sky, while Eliot Coventry, pacing restlessly to and fro in his silent study, gibed at himself with a savage irony because, though he had successfully steeled himself to meet, unmoved, the woman who had violated all his trust in her, a whiff of the sweet, heady scent of heliotrope had flooded his whole being with a resurgent bitterness so deep and so indomitable that it had utterly submerged his dawning faith. CHAPTER XVIII A BATTLE OF WILLS One man sows and another reaps, and sometimes the harvest is a curiously unexpected one for the reaper. Coventry had sown harshness and distrust, and Brett reaped a harvest of kindness and favour in the quarter where he least anticipated it.