She stood gazing at him through the shadows, pistol on hip.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean that happiness is not necessary to life.  Life goes on all the same.  My life has continued for six years without that happiness which some believe to be essential.”

After a silence she said:  “I can tell by the way you speak that you are well born.  I—­I dread to do what I simply must do.”

He, too, sat silent a long time—­long enough for an utterly perverse and whimsical humor to take complete possession of him.

“Won’t you let me go—­this time?” he pleaded.

“I cannot.”

“You had better let me go while you can,” he said, “because, perhaps, you may find it difficult to get rid of me later.”

Affronted, she shrank back from the doorway and stood in the center of her room, angry, disdainful, beautiful, under the ruddy glory of her lustrous hair.

His perverse mood changed, too; he leaned forward, studying her minutely—­the splendid gray eyes, the delicate mouth and nose, the full, sweet lips, the witchery of wrist and hand, and the flowing, rounded outline of limb and body under the pretty gown.  Could this be she?  This lovely, mature woman, wearing scarcely a trace of the young girl he had never forgotten—­scarcely a trace save in the beauty of her eyes and hair—­save in the full, red mouth, sweet and sensitive even in its sudden sullenness?

“Once,” he said, and his voice sounded to him like voices heard in dreams—­“once, years and years ago, there was a steamer, and a man and a young girl on board.  Do you mind my telling you about it?”

She stood leaning against the footboard of the bed, not even deigning to raise her eyes in reply.  So he made the slightest stir in his chair; and then she looked up quickly enough, pistol poised.

“The steamer,” said Kerns slowly, “was coming into Southampton—­six years ago.  On deck these two people stood—­a man of twenty-eight, a girl of eighteen—­six years ago.  The name of the steamer was the Carnatic.  Did you ever hear of that ship?”

She was looking at him attentively.  He waited for her reply; she made none; and he went on.

“The man had asked the girl something—­I don’t know what—­I don’t know why her gray eyes filled with tears.  Perhaps it was because she could not do what the man asked her to do.  It may have been to love him; it may have been that he was asking her to marry him and that she couldn’t.  Perhaps that is why there were tears in her eyes—­because she may have been sorry to cause him the pain of refusal—­sorry, perhaps, perhaps a little guilty.  Because she must have seen that he was falling in love with her, and she—­she let him—­knowing all the time that she was to marry another man.  Did you ever hear of that man before?”

She had straightened up, quivering, wide eyed, lips parted.  He rose and walked slowly into her room, confronting her under the full glare of light.