"Are you quite sure you want me, Robin?" she asked. "Quite sure," he answered gravely. "Then, if you're really sure, I'll marry you whenever you like--after Ann is married." He kissed her with a deep, grave passion, holding her closely in his arms. "You shall forget the past, dearest--I promise you, you shall forget all the things that hurt you," he said with tender reassurance. Presently, when the first few minutes were passed, he smiled down at her, a gleam of mirth in his eyes. "I shall see to it that Ann and Eliot don't postpone their wedding--if it means postponing ours! You said 'after,' you know." She nodded. "Yes. I can't possibly commandeer Ann's natural protector"--smiling--"until she's safely bestowed in some one else's care." But though she jested about the stipulation she had made, it was the outcome of a curiously definite idea. Since it was through her that Eliot's happiness had once been wrecked, she felt as though, until this new-found happiness which had come to him were assured--secure beyond any shadow of doubt--she was not free to take her own. It was in a sense an expiation, a pathetic little human effort to propitiate fate and turn aside any blow; aimed at Eliot's happiness by those jealous gods who exact payment to the very last farthing. * * * * * Ann was overjoyed when she heard of Robin's engagement. To know that her adored brother would not be left lonely by her marriage, and to see Cara, whose former experience of matrimony had proved such a ghastly failure, with a new, brooding gladness in her eyes, added the last drop to her cup of happiness. "_Dear_ Robin, I'm so pleased!" she told him. "If I'd been choosing a wife for you myself I couldn't have chosen any one nicer than Cara!" "Glad you're pleased," Robin returned gruffly--the gruffness being merely the cloak to conceal his own riotous felicity which every Englishman in similar circumstances thinks it necessary to assume. But Ann saw through it, and was not to be deterred from frank rejoicing. "It will be perfectly lovely to have my best friend married to my best brother," she continued. "Where shall you live? At the Priory or the Cottage?" "We haven't got as far as making such world-shaking decisions as that," he grinned. "Perhaps we might live at the Priory and week-end at the Cottage"--whimsically. Ann found a further cause for rejoicing in the continued absence of Brett Forrester. She had never seen him again since the morning when, with an intense feeling of relief, she had watched the _Sphinx_ steam out from Silverquay harbour. Lady Susan was much too incensed against him to invite him to White Windows, and Ann rested fairly secure in the hope that she would never see him again, or, at least, not until she was Eliot's wife. After that, she felt she would not be afraid to meet him. He could work her no more harm then.