I asked. “Would you return to England and safety?”

She took a handful of the sand and let it slowly drift through her white fingers. “You know that I would not,” she said; “not if the end were to come to-night. Only — only” — She turned from me and looked far out to sea. I could not see her face, only the dusk of her hair and her heaving bosom. “My blood may be upon your hands,” she said in a whisper, “but yours will be upon my soul.”

She turned yet further away, and covered her eyes with her hand. I arose, and bent over her until I could have touched with my lips that bowed head. “Jocelyn,” I said.

A branch of yellow fruit fell beside us, and my Lord Carnal, a mass of gaudy bloom in his hand, stepped from the wood.