She looked at him--so helpless in his passion--and the protective instinct of a real woman for her man began to stir in her: so, in spite of her own pain, she tried hard to find something to say that would comfort him. "You--you'll get over it," she said, her voice shaking. "It isn't as if you and I had been going together long, you know. You'll soon forget me."
She drew back offended. "Oh! All right." She rose with a sort of dignity. "I think I'd better be going home. It must be getting late."
"Now you're vexed." He peered at her--haggard-eyed in that curious twilight from the sea. "Can't you see that everything you do and say makes me want you more? If you'd only turned out a fool!" He drew a long breath.
"I must be going home," she repeated, moving away.
He caught hold of her dress as she went. "Carrie, I can't let you go. I can't do without you."
"You'll have to," she said sombrely. "We shall both have to. There's no help for it."
He waited a moment, then the words seemed to come out of themselves--despite him. "I'm not married yet, you know."
She started. "You don't mean----" Then she backed away from him, the silhouette of her slim figure very clear against the luminous background of sea and sky--every line of it dragging at his senses--hurting him with pity. "You know you couldn't do it," she said after a pause. "We neither of us could. It would kill her. Besides, I couldn't sneak another girl's man after the banns were up and the cake bought--a girl who'd never done me any harm. I aren't so low down as all that, yet."
"Anything is better than marrying without love," he said, but he said it half-heartedly. How was a decent man to throw over a charming devoted girl to whom he was to be married in a fortnight, shaming her before all her little world after he had sought and won her? He thought of Laura's soft acquiescence with an agony of self-reproach and impatience. Then he heard Caroline speaking again, her voice low and clear with the murmur of the sea running in and out of it--he felt it go to his heart.
"It's too late to begin to think whether you'll be miserable or not now," she said. "You made her fond of you. It was your own doing. And you wouldn't get me if you did give her up. I'd no more take you from her, now she's got her wedding-dress and all, than I'd stick a knife into a baby sleeping in its pram. She worships you--can't you see that? It would spoil all her life."
