"Is it too much altogether to face, dear?" he asked. "I think it will be best for you... God knows, I don't wish you to do it! I'd rather a thousand times you followed my suggestion. If you won't do that, then the other course it seems to me is the only means of safeguarding your position. After all, it is merely hastening things a bit. You always intended legalising the marriage." "Yes," she said, and was silent, thinking. "I know you are right," she added after reflection. "I'll do whatever you think wise. But I feel that I ought not to let you undertake this too. I am fairly heavily in your debt already; and there is no return that I can make." Dare smiled at her. "There is no question of debt or gratitude between us," he replied. "I promised to see you through. I am going to do that. Afterwards..." The sound of the luncheon gong filled in the pause. Dare got up, without completing the sentence, and putting his hand within her arm walked with her through her room into the corridor. "I have to go out after lunch," he said. Though he did not explain his reason for going, she felt that it was about her business. "I shall probably only get back in time to fetch my suit case, and say good-bye. I wonder--will you be on the balcony, so that I shall be able to find you?" "I'll be there," she answered, "in the same place, outside my room." And so, with the imminent prospect of coming separation hanging over them, they went into luncheon together, and loitered over the meal, talking fragmentally, as people do who have discussed everything of vital interest and have come down to the bedrock of commonplace things. "You'll wire me," he said once, returning to the subject occupying both their minds, "if you find yourself in any doubt or difficulty? It's nothing of a journey between this and Johannesburg." She promised; and Dare, satisfied on this point, went on with his meal Pamela could not eat. She trifled with the food which the waiter put on her plate, and watched Dare, thinking of the many meals she would take in that room without him; thinking of the lonely hours she would spend, missing his companionship, missing him,--the lonely years, when the only link between them would be the chain of letters she had promised to interchange... those, and memory. The future loomed so bleak and empty that she was afraid to look forward. Always she pictured herself shrinking, shrinking ever from the pathetic sight of suffering,--from the shadow of the man that had been, and the duty that would tie her continually to his side. Pamela had yet to learn that there is no path, upon the fingerpost of which Duty is clearly inscribed, so difficult for the traveller's reluctant steps but that beauty is to be met along the road, and peace waits at the finish. CHAPTER THIRTY THREE.