“No, no!  Indeed, I’m not!  Don’t you flatter yourself!  I am not hurt, and I’m not the sort of person to go begging a man to marry me, either.  I don’t think—­I really don’t think that I am quite so poorly off as all that comes to.”  Here she laughed, but only for an instant.  “If you were to go down on your knees before me, Guthrie, I would not have you now, after the things you have said to me.”

The statement calmed and strengthened him.  He felt able to say the rest.

“Quite right, Francie.  Dozens of men will come courting you as soon as you go out again, and any one of them will make you a better husband than I should have done; but not a better friend.  I hope you will always remember that.”

“Many thanks.  Will you be so very kind as to release my hands, Captain Carey?  They ache.”

“One moment.  I want to make sure of the last chance I shall get to explain—­to tell you exactly what I mean—­you, who are old enough, experienced enough, to understand.  I don’t want to defend myself, Francie—­not at all.  I am not the cad to say, ’The woman tempted me, and I did eat.’  I don’t blame you, dear—­I don’t blame anybody.  A woman is a woman; and a lovely woman like you—­well, the way things are managed in this world, I don’t believe she can help herself.  But look here, Francie, a man is a man too, and a good deal more so.  If you were a girl, I wouldn’t say this; but you knew—­you knew what you were doing when you laid yourself out to be sweet and—­ and kind to a fellow, as you were to me.  Did you take me for an old maid or a Social Purity Society?  You know you didn’t.  A man does his best, but he’s too heavily handicapped—­I won’t say by nature—­ perhaps by habit, which is second nature—­the habit of generations, inherited in his blood—­and his case is not on all-fours with your case.  And especially when he is a sailor—­so cut off—­so deprived—­ Very well.  And so it happened—­as it happened.  Never mind about the right and wrong.  What’s wrong today may be right tomorrow; and in any case, no arguing can undo what’s done.  We’ll leave that.”

She sat before him, panting, and the roses in her cheeks were white.  Happily, the fire had grown a little dull by this time.

“For myself,” he continued, speaking slowly, as if trying to think things out—­“for myself, whether I ought to repent or not, I don’t—­I can’t.  Theoretically, I know it is always the man who is in the wrong, and I should have been foully in the wrong—­I should be unfit to live —­if you had been an unmarried girl, Francie—­or if I had been the—­ the—­”

“Oh!” she moaned bitterly, grasping his point of view, if not the plain justice of it.  “But I have brought it on myself—­I have only myself to thank.  I made myself cheap, and must take the consequences.”