"I shall not keep you long."

They walked in silence, their feet slipping and slithering in the loose sand, until they reached the bridge; then stopped to lean on the low parapet and stare down at the water just below.

"You heard what I said in the car?" he asked.

Perhaps she thought he was addressing the fishes for she made no answer. Then very quietly he said again:

"I love you, Amber!"

There was a great stillness between them. Truly as the wise people of old held, to give a man the use of your name is to give him power over you! He felt that he had power over her and perhaps that was why her hand lying on the bridge rail trembled, though her voice was quite level.

"Why do you call me by that name, Mr Bettington?"

"Because I love you, woman with the amber eyes, and the amber hair, and the clear amber heart," he said gently and strongly, and took her hands in his. "And I think that you love me."

"You are mistaken," she said coldly, drawing away her hands.

The light went out of his face like a quenched flame. He turned away and leaned heavily on the bridge. She continued calmly:

"You merely have for me the terrible charm that a bad man has for a woman when he is the first bad man she has ever known."

"Me?" cried Bettington, forgetting dignity and grammar and everything else in genuine astonishment. "I’m not bad! I like that! What about Stannard?"

She seemed flabbergasted for a moment, then:

"How generous you are!" she said scornfully. "Besides he is not really a bad man, only a weak one."

"One bad man is worth forty weak ones," averred Bettington bitterly. He was astonished and indignant at the line the conversation had taken.

"I do not deny that there is much good in you," she said more kindly. "I can never forget how kind you have been on the journey down. When I think of all the things you did for me and Aimee I hardly know how to thank you."

"Don’t try," he interrupted. "I did nothing any man wouldn’t have done for you."

He had to gulp all the same, thinking of Aimee and her bottles and her bag of impedimenta.

"And now you spoil it all," she said sorrowfully. "By taking me for one of those hateful, disloyal women to whom any man may make love the moment she is out of her husband’s sight!"

"In all humility I beg you to forgive me," said Bettington.

There was no doubt about it that for once in his life he was getting the worst of it, but somehow he minded that fact less than he minded the tightening grip round his heart. In grim earnest, now, he heard "the tolling of Life’s curfew" bidding them to part, and he wondered what he should do with the rest of his life. She had not quite finished rubbing his nose in the dust.

"How can I forgive you? I should not consider myself worthy of the worst or weakest man in the world if I were such a woman as you thought."

But Bettington’s nose was too sore for any further ill-treatment. His natural combativeness began to reassert itself.

"I didn’t think anything," he said moodily. "I just couldn’t help loving you, that’s all. If you want me to abase myself any more, Amber, say so, and I’ll do it. But that won’t prevent me from going on loving you."

She intimated with great dignity that she wished nothing further of him but the courtesy of his escort back to the hotel. They returned in silence, but at the door of the stoep, just as she was on the point of going in, she said quietly: