Honora laughed.

“I hadn’t noticed anything peculiar about him,” she answered.

“This boat reminds me of Adele,” said Mrs. Shorter.  “She loved it.  I can see how she could get a divorce from Dicky—­but the ‘Folly’!  She told me yesterday that the sight of it made her homesick, and Eustace Rindge won’t leave Paris.”

It suddenly occurred to Honora, as she glanced around the yacht, that Mrs. Rindge rather haunted her.

“So that is your answer,” said Chiltern, when they were alone again.

“What other can I give you?”

“Is it because you are married?” he demanded.

She grew crimson.

“Isn’t that an unnecessary question?”

“No,” he declared.  “It concerns me vitally to understand you.  You were good enough to wish that I should find happiness.  I have found the possibility of it—­in you.”

“Oh,” she cried, “don’t say such things!”

“Have you found happiness?” he asked.

She turned her face from him towards their shining wake.  But he had seen that her eyes were filled with sudden tears.

“Forgive me,” he pleaded; “I did not mean to be brutal.  I said that because I felt as I have never in my life felt before.  As I did not know I could feel.  I can’t account for it, but I ask you to believe me.”

“I can account for it,” she answered presently, with a strange gentleness.  “It is because you met me at a critical time.  Such-coincidences often occur in life.  I happened to be a woman; and, I confess it, a woman who was interested.  I could not have been interested if you had been less real, less sincere.  But I saw that you were going through a crisis; that you might, with your powers, build up your life into a splendid and useful thing.  And, womanlike, my instinct was to help you.  I should not have allowed you to go on, but—­but it all happened so quickly that I was bewildered.  I—­I do not understand it myself.”

He listened hungrily, and yet at times with evident impatience.

“No,” he said, “I cannot believe that it was an accident.  It was you—­”

She stopped him with an imploring gesture.

“Please,” she said, “please let us go in.”

Without an instant’s hesitation he brought the sloop about and headed her for the light-ship on Brenton’s reef, and they sailed in silence.  Awhile she watched the sapphire waters break to dazzling whiteness under the westerning sun.  Then, in an ecstasy she did not seek to question, she closed her eyes to feel more keenly the swift motion of their flight.  Why not?  The sea, the winds of heaven, had aided others since the dawn of history.  Legend was eternally true.  On these very shores happiness had awaited those who had dared to face primeval things.

She looked again, this time towards an unpeopled shore.  No sentinel guarded the uncharted reefs, and the very skies were smiling, after the storm, at the scudding fates.