“But you see—­I really do know he wasn’t such a coward, Hugo,” said Carlisle, with the same nervous eagerness to accuse herself.  “I—­I knew him quite well—­at one time.  He was a wonderful swimmer, never afraid....  Perhaps it’s only a feeling—­but, indeed, I know he wouldn’t have swum off and left me—­if—­”

“My dear girl, if you were really so certain of that, why didn’t you say so at the time?”

Carlisle, looking at the floor, said wistfully:  “If I only had....”

She was acutely aware that his question carried a new tone into the discussion, that Hugo had criticised her for the first time.  The tiny crack in their perfect understanding yawned suddenly wider.  And distressed, and pitifully conscious that it was all her fault, Cally flung herself instinctively across the breach.  Her gaze still lowered, she took Hugo’s hand and pressed it to her smooth cheek:  an endearing thing, and done with a muteness more touching than any speech.

Canning was moved.  She was not demonstrative by habit.  He kissed the cheek, for once almost as if she were a child.  And he said that of course she would have said so that night, except that she hadn’t really been certain of anything of the sort then.  That feeling came now, born of excessive sympathy and nervous shock.  The mistake would be to accept these feelings for her final judgment on such a very complicated and serious matter.

So he was arguing the case for postponement of discussion once more, with excellent good sense and an even more moving insistence....

If he had now but ceased his argument, turned, gathered her to his arms, and adjured her by his overflowing love to entrust herself to him, it is possible that within two minutes he might have had her weeping on his breast, in complete surrender.  Body and soul, she was sore with much pounding:  more than an hour ago, she needed sympathy and comfort now, loverly occupation of the desolating lonely places within her.  But Canning argued, seeing nothing else to do, argued with a deepening note of patience in his voice.  And when he stopped at length, it was natural that she should argue back:  though she really meant this for her last attempt to convey the dim light that was in her.

“I hate to seem so silly and obstinate, Hugo.  I—­I can’t seem to explain it exactly.  But I really don’t think that waiting would make any difference—­in my feeling.  And don’t you think, if I feel I ... couldn’t be happy till I—­got this off my mind....”

Again he explained that this feeling was but a passing illusion, here to-day, gone to-morrow.

Carlisle hesitated.  But Canning, seeing only silence for his pains, said with a little quickening of his tone: 

“Tell me, my dear!  Honestly, would such a thought as that—­about your happiness—­ever have occurred to you if it hadn’t been suggested to you by Dr. Vivian?”

Natural as the inquiry was to Canning, it jangled oddly upon Carlisle.  She could not understand Hugo’s recurrence to this man; it seemed curiously unreasonable, quite unlike him and somehow quite unjust....