Afterwards

"No." In the moonlight she faced him, and her eyes looked oddly luminous. "For a derelict's the greatest danger a boat can encounter on the high seas ... all our boats cross and recross the paths of others, you know, and no man has the right to place another's ship in peril by his own--carelessness."

"By God, you're right," he said vehemently; and she did not resent his hasty speech. "Mrs. Carstairs, you've done more for me to-night than you know--and if I can repay you I will, though it cost me all I have in the world."

"You can repay me very easily," she said, holding out her hand, all the motherhood in her coming to the surface. "Save Cherry--she is all I have--now--in the world; and her little barque, at least, was meant to dance over summer seas."

"God helping me, I will save her," he said, taking her hand in a quick, earnest clasp; and then he entered his waiting car and drove away without another word, a new courage in his heart.

* * * * *

And as Chloe gently closed the heavy door on the peaceful, fragrant world without and returned to the little room where Cherry lay in an uneasy slumber, she knew that a faint suspicion which had crossed her mind earlier in the summer had been verified to-night.

"He too loved Iris," she said to herself, with a rather sad little smile. "And I thought--once--that she was ready to love him in return. But, I suppose she preferred Bruce. Only"--Chloe had no illusions on the subject of her brother--"I believe Dr. Anstice would have made her a happier woman than Bruce will ever be able to do. And if he"--she did not refer to Cheniston now--"has lost his chance of happiness to-day, no wonder he feels that he has been in hell. For there is no hell so terrible as the one in which a soul who loves wanders alone, without its beloved," said the woman whose husband had left her because of a cruel doubt. "From the bottom of my heart I pity that man to-night!"

And then, re-entering Cherry's little room, pathetic now in its very brightness of colouring, Chloe forgot all else in the world save the child who slept, in the narrow bed, watched by Margaret Trevor's soft, brooding eyes.