I suppose I must have dropped off to sleep directly I threw myself down on my bed, and have slept for some time.

It was growing dusk in my little bedroom; outside my window veils of purple gauze were drawn over sand-hills and shore, and the tide was far out again by the time I was awakened by a tap at my bedroom door.

“Yes?” I called drowsily, wondering, for a second, where I was, and what horrible thing it was that seemed lying in wait for me to wake up properly and remember it.

The door opened and Mrs. Waters came in, carrying a little tray.

“I’ve brought you this, dear.” It was a glass of ginger wine with two biscuits laid over the top of it. “I know you stayed in the water too long this afternoon; you were done up. Drink it up, child.”

I sat up, and she put out her hand to smooth my damp hair while I finished the glassful.

“That’s better, isn’t it?”

“Much, thank you,” I sighed gratefully; for the wine had seemed very heartening, and heartening was what I needed. The horrible memory had come back to me. Two of them, in fact: that of this morning, even before that of this afternoon. His mother knew nothing of either; that I read in the pink, December rose of a face under the grey hair. The dear! and I must leave her....

“I’ve brought you something else too,” she said, almost shyly, like a schoolgirl who isn’t sure that she won’t be snubbed; “something you’ll like.”

She put her hand to her soft black muslin bodice, unfastened something that was hidden inside, and brought out a thin, old-fashioned pendant of flat gold, slung on a slender golden chain.

She opened it and held it out to me. I took it in my hand and carried it to the window, where there was still enough light by which to see it well.

Coiled up below the oval glass, faintly gold as thistle-down in sunshine, and fine as floss-silk, there was a baby’s curl.

“That was the very first curl I ever cut from Billy, the day that he was christened,” his mother told me softly, sitting on the side of my bed, while I stood, not knowing how to speak to her, by the window. “He had such pretty hair always!” she went on, “quite as pretty as Theo’s is now. Only boys—men always seem to look upon curly hair as a sort of affliction; they’re never satisfied unless they’re flattening it out with brushes and horrid stuff out of bottles, are they? And when we all go back to Sevenoaks again, Nancy—”

I lifted my head to try to interrupt her, to say something about my being forced to go away before, but no words came; she went on talking, as if more to herself than to anyone else, of what seemed, just then, almost unbearable to me.

—“I’ll show you heaps of other little things that belonged to him as a baby. His very first tiny shirt! They put new babies into shirts then, you know. Fine linen, with narrow, real lace round the neck and the little sleeves.... Oh, of course I know those silk-and-wool vests they have now are much more sensible. I’m quite modern, really. Still—there’s a lovely embroidered christening-robe of his ... all his robes. I made others for Blanche and Theo. I’d a fancy to keep them all separate, so that when they—my babies!—grew up and married they could have them handed on. So all Billy’s will be for you, Nancy—and the little locket. I knew you’d care to keep it.”

“I?” I cried, aghast and huskily. I held it back to her. “Oh, no! It’s not for me!”

“Of course it is. I always meant to give it to his bride on her wedding-morning.”

“Then you keep it for—for her, until then,” I broke in, with a little laugh that sounded wild in my own ears, and I pressed the pendant with the christening-day curl back into his mother’s hand. She said nothing for a moment.

Presently, in the dusk, I felt her long arm slip round me, and her hesitating, gentle voice was saying very earnestly and pitifully: “Nancy! You do care for my boy, don’t you?”

And then into that day of queer and crowded horrible happenings, there was packed yet another.

In my own ears I heard my own voice answering his mother’s appeal with words I could scarcely recognize as my own. Yet it was no freak of imagination this time. It was no mad fancy like that on the beach. It was I, Monica Trant, who in that voice so shaking and strained cried desperately:

“Oh, yes! Yes! You know I care for him!”

And with that avowal in my ears I felt as if some stranger had cried aloud a secret that I had never even guessed, but that now—now I knew to be coming true.

I found myself putting out my hands before me, almost as if this growing knowledge were something that I could hold away from myself. For a time I must hold it away; I must! For at least as long as I remained here. I clenched my hands tightly, dropping them to my sides, using all my will to bring myself to speak in my usual voice again.

“Will you tell me what time it is, Mrs. Waters?”

“Half-past seven. You’ll go to bed early, dear, won’t you? You won’t stop up!”

“No, I’ll go to bed.”

“And to-morrow—Nancy, I don’t want to say much more. Only, Life promises to be so golden, dear, for you and him!”

It was then that she gave me a sting that I wish I could forget. I shall forget, but not at once, that his mother said:

“Fate has been merciful to let you two meet. Don’t let that be spoiled! To-morrow——”

I held her hand with that little locket in it clutched for a minute against my breast.

“It shall be different to-morrow,” I whispered before she went, keeping my meaning to myself. It will, of course, be “different” enough!

Half-past seven. There was just time, then, to send my wire.

I crept out silently over the sand-hills and away to the tiny post office where, thank goodness, the postmistress’s literal English won’t allow her to read much between the lines of this.

If she only has the sense to answer that correctly, and at once!