“There’s your picture!” he said.  “Take it—­and hang it in your ’admirable light’!” And he strode out of the room.

A long silence fell between the two who were left.  Then Rooke, who was staring at the ruin of his work with his mouth twisted, into an odd, cynical smile, murmured beneath his breath: 

“Sic transit . . .”

Once more the silence wrapped them round.  Wan-faced and with staring eyes, Nan drew near the heap of mangled canvas.

At last: 

“I can’t bear it!  I can’t bear it!” she whispered, and a shuddering sob shook her slight frame from head to foot.  “Oh, Maryon—­”

She stretched her hands towards him gropingly, like a child that is frightened in the dark.

. . .  Half an hour later found them still together, standing with linked hands.  In Rooke’s eyes there was a quiet light of triumph, while Nan’s attitude betrayed a kind of hesitancy, as of one driven along strange and unknown ways.

“Then you’ll come, Nan, you’ll come?” he said eagerly.

“I’ll come,” she answered dully.  “I can’t bear my life any longer.”

“I’ll make you happy. . . .  I swear it!”

“Will you, Maryon?” She shook her head and the eyes she raised to his were full of a dumb, hopeless misery.  “I don’t think anything could ever make me—­happy.  But I’d have gone on . . .  I’d have borne it . . . if Uncle David were still here.  What we are going to do would have hurt him so”—­and her voice trembled.  “But he’s gone, and now nothing seems to matter very much.”

A sudden overwhelming tenderness for this pain-racked, desolate spirit surged up in Maryon’s heart.

“You poor little child!” he murmured.  “You poor child!”

And gathering her into his arms he held her closely, leaning his cheek against her hair, with no passion, but with a swift, understanding sympathy that sprang from the best that was in the man.

She clung to him forlornly, so tired and hopeless she no longer felt any impulse to resist him.  She had tried—­tried to withstand him and to go on treading the uphill path that lay before her.  But now she had come to the end of her strength.  She would go away with Maryon . . . go out of it all . . . and somewhere, perhaps, together they would build up a new and happier life.

Dimly at the back of her mind floated the memory of Peter’s words: 

“But there’s honour, dear, and duty . . .”

She crushed down the remembrance resolutely.  If she were going away into a new world with Maryon, the door of memory must be closed fast.

CHAPTER XXXII

THE GREEN CAR

The atmosphere still held the chill of early morning as Sandy emerged, vigorous and glowing and amazingly hungry, from his daily swim in the sea.  He dressed quickly in a small tent erected on the shore and then, whistling cheerfully and with his towel slung over his shoulders, took his way up the beach to where his bicycle stood propped against a boulder.