The Privet Hedge Part 29

She pulled herself away from him, sobbing out with a wild earnestness which he found incomprehensible: "No! No! You can't start yet. You have her kisses on your mouth yet."

"You didn't seem to mind that before," he said, suddenly white with anger. "I don't know why you should start to be jealous of Laura now everything is over."

"I'm not jealous," she said. "It is not that." Then she stopped short. He must believe what he liked, for she could not betray the secret of a girl whose love, she felt, was finer than her own.

"Well, you have no need to be jealous," he said. "She spoke nicely about you. She was awfully decent about it, and hoped you and she would be friends."

"Oh! I wish we could be," said Caroline, but deep down in her own consciousness she knew this would never happen; because it is not in human nature for a woman to cease being jealous of another who has done more than herself for the man she loves.

He stood there disconsolately, kicking a pebble. He had come hot-foot to claim her, never antic.i.p.ating a check; and now she seemed to be somehow drifting farther and farther away from him.

"I don't know if you are still thinking about the money Laura lent me,"

he said at last. "I begin to wish now I hadn't told you. But I wanted to have everything quite straight." He paused. "As a matter of fact, I have paid it back. The bank was a bit awkward at first, but I was able to come to an arrangement with them a day or two ago, and I have repaid Laura what she lent me." He paused again, looking at her almost comically: "There, I hope you quite understand?"

They were indeed talking to each other more like enemies than lovers; and Caroline seemed to be more than ever withdrawn and aloof--for all her ignorance and simplicity of feeling--when she answered him in an inward brooding tone: "Yes, I understand." For she really saw neither G.o.dfrey nor the sh.o.r.e, only Laura coming flushed out of the door marked "Private" behind the bank counter. For now--at last--she did see where it all led. She had to join issue with Laura to spare the pride of this man whom both loved. His faith in his own power of overcoming difficulties was the foundation on which his life was built, and they must not pull it from under him. She, at any rate, could not so humiliate him.

"The difficulty was only temporary," he went on, trying to find out what she was waiting for. "I tried to do too much business for my capital. But I'm bound to get on. We shall be all right."

"Don't!" she said sharply. "I don't care about money. I wasn't thinking about that."

"Then what's the matter?"

She looked at him dumbly, and something in her tear-stained face tugged irresistibly at his heartstrings. "Don't look like that," he said.

"Let's forget all that has happened before. You don't mean you will turn me down, too?"

She shook her head, still unable to keep back the tears.

"Then why are you crying?" he said, putting his arm round her.

"There's nothing to cry for, Carrie." He spoke to her soothingly, tenderly, as a man might to a child who was in trouble.

"Oh, G.o.dfrey!" She drew herself away from him once more. "I aren't half as good as her. I aren't half as good as her. You'd have been a great deal happier and more comfortable with her."

"I know that," he said. "But I don't want to be happy and comfortable.

I want to live." He caught hold of her hand, which he crushed so tightly that it hurt. "And I want you with me."

They heard a sudden noise from the cliff top where two boys raced and shouted, so they walked on. Feathery clots of foam blew before them on the sand, almost as if sea-flowers from the changeless ocean were being flung in the pathway of that which is unchangeable in human life.

After a while Caroline said with a start, waking out of her dream: "I wonder what Mrs. Bradford will say? But she won't be so upset as Miss Ethel would have been." She lowered her voice. "Do you know what Miss Panton said it was that actually killed Miss Ethel? It was everything being so different."

"Yes." He paused. "Well, thousands of people are dying from the same cause, I suppose, all over the world--middle-aged ones, that is." Then he strengthened his grasp on her arm. "But we're young. We're all right. Eh, Caroline?"

THE END

By the Same Author

THE HOUSE WITH THE GOLDEN WINDOWS YOUNG HEARTS THE GIRL IN FANCY DRESS MARRIAGE WHILE YOU WAIT THE GOSSIP SHOP THE SILENT LEGION THE TALE OF MR. TUBBS THE MATCHMAKERS THE ROUND-ABOUT DOWN OUR STREET A LITTLE GREEN WORLD BECAUSE OF JANE LOVE IN A LITTLE TOWN THE GREY SHEPHERD