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Sybil shook her head slowly but emphatically.

“I am quite sure you wouldn’t. For one thing you would be too poor, and for another you would be too proud.”

“Are you very poor?” he asked her point blank.

She nodded.

“And very proud.”

“And your people?”

“Only my father is living, and I have quarrelled with him.”

“Can’t you make it up?”

“No,” she said sharply and emphatically. “I could never return to my father. There is no room for me now that he has married again. I would sooner sell matches at a street corner than go back to what I have left.”

“So that’s it, is it?” said Mercer. He was looking at her very attentively with his brows drawn down. “You are not happy at home, so you are plunging into matrimony to get away from it all.”

“We have been engaged for three years,” she protested, flushing.

“You said that before,” he remarked. “It seems to be your only argument, and a confoundedly shaky one at that.”

She laughed rather unsteadily.

“You are not very encouraging.”

“No,” said Mercer.

He was still looking at her somewhat sternly. Involuntarily almost she avoided his eyes.

“Perhaps,” she said, with a touch of wistfulness, “when you see my fiance you will change your mind.”

He turned from her with obvious impatience.

“Perhaps you will change yours,” he said.

And with that surly rejoinder of his the conversation ended. The next moment he moved abruptly away, leaving her in possession.

III

It was early morning when they came at last into port. When Sybil appeared on deck she found it crowded with excited men, and the hubbub was deafening. A multitude of small boats buzzed to and fro on the tumbling waters below them, and she expected every instant to see one swamped as the great ship floated majestically through the throng.

She had anticipated a crowd of people on the wharf to witness their arrival, but the knot of men gathered there scarcely numbered a score. She scanned them eagerly, but it took only a very few seconds to convince her that Robin Wentworth was not among them. And there had been no letter from him at Colombo.

“They don’t allow many people on the wharf,” said Mercer’s voice behind her. “There will be more on the other side of the Customs house.”

She looked up at him, bravely smiling, though her heart was throbbing almost to suffocation and she could not speak a word.

He passed on into the crowd and she lost sight of him.

There followed a delay of nearly half-an-hour, during which she stood where she was in the glaring sunshine, dumbly watching. The town, with its many buildings, its roar of traffic; the harbour, with its ships and its hooting sirens; the hot sky, the water that shone like molten brass; all were stamped upon her aching brain with nightmare distinctness. She felt as one caught in some pitiless machine that would crush her to atoms before she could escape.

The gangways were fixed at last, and there was a general movement. She went with the crowd, Mercer’s last words still running through her brain with a reiteration that made them almost meaningless. On the other side of the Customs house! Of course, of course she would find Robin there, waiting for her!

She said it to herself over and over as she stepped ashore, and she began to picture their meeting. And then, suddenly, an awful doubt assailed her. She could not recall his features. His image would not rise before her. The memory of his face had passed completely from her mind. It had never done so before, and she was scared. But she strove to reassure herself with the thought that she must surely recognize him the moment her eyes beheld him. It was but a passing weakness this, born of her agitation. Of course, she would know him, and he would know her, too, mightily though she felt she had changed during those three years that they had not met.