I--I dread to do what I simply must do." He, too, sat silent a long time--long enough for an utterly perverse and whimsical humor to take complete possession of him.
"_Won't_ you let me go--_this_ time ?" he pleaded.
"I cannot." "You had better let me go while you can," he said, "because, perhaps, you may find it difficult to get rid of me later." Affronted, she shrank back from the doorway and stood in the center of her room, angry, disdainful, beautiful, under the ruddy glory of her lustrous hair.
His perverse mood changed, too; he leaned forward, studying her minutely--the splendid gray eyes, the delicate mouth and nose, the full, sweet lips, the witchery of wrist and hand, and the flowing, rounded outline of limb and body under the pretty gown.

Could this be _she_?
This lovely, mature woman, wearing scarcely a trace of the young girl he had never forgotten--scarcely a trace save in the beauty of her eyes and hair--save in the full, red mouth, sweet and sensitive even in its sudden sullenness?
"Once," he said, and his voice sounded to him like voices heard in dreams--"once, years and years ago, there was a steamer, and a man and a young girl on board.

Do you mind my telling you about it ?" She stood leaning against the footboard of the bed, not even deigning to raise her eyes in reply.

So he made the slightest stir in his chair; and then she looked up quickly enough, pistol poised.
"The steamer," said Kerns slowly, "was coming into Southampton--six years ago.

On deck these two people stood--a man of twenty-eight, a girl of eighteen--six years ago.