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“She put her hands on my shoulders and looked at me with deep, deep eyes. ‘Then you didn’t expect me to stay?’ she asked.

“I caught her hands and pressed them to me, stammering out that I hadn’t dared to dream….

“‘You thought I’d come–just for an hour?’

“‘How could I dare think more? I adore you, you know, for what you’ve done! But it would be known if you–if you stayed on. My servants–everybody about here knows you. I’ve no right to expose you to the risk.’ She made no answer, and I went on tenderly: ‘Give me, if you will, the next few hours: there’s a train that will get you to town by midnight. And then we’ll arrange something–in town–where it’s safer for you–more easily managed…. It’s beautiful, it’s heavenly of you to have come; but I love you too much–I must take care of you and think for you–‘

“I don’t suppose it ever took me so long to say so few words, and though they were profoundly sincere they sounded unutterably shallow, irrelevant and grotesque. She made no effort to help me out, but sat silent, listening, with her meditative smile. ‘It’s my duty, dearest, as a man,’ I rambled on. The more I love you the more I’m bound–‘

“‘Yes; but you don’t understand,’ she interrupted.

“She rose as she spoke, and I got up also, and we stood and looked at each other.

“‘I haven’t come for a night; if you want me I’ve come for always,’ she said.

“Here again, if I give you an honest account of my feelings I shall write myself down as the poor-spirited creature I suppose I am. There wasn’t, I swear, at the moment, a grain of selfishness, of personal reluctance, in my feeling. I worshipped every hair of her head–when we were together I was happy, when I was away from her something was gone from every good thing; but I had always looked on our love for each other, our possible relation to each other, as such situations are looked on in what is called society. I had supposed her, for all her freedom and originality, to be just as tacitly subservient to that view as I was: ready to take what she wanted on the terms on which society concedes such taking, and to pay for it by the usual restrictions, concealments and hypocrisies. In short, I supposed that she would ‘play the game’–look out for her own safety, and expect me to look out for it. It sounds cheap enough, put that way–but it’s the rule we live under, all of us. And the amazement of finding her suddenly outside of it, oblivious of it, unconscious of it, left me, for an awful minute, stammering at her like a graceless dolt…. Perhaps it wasn’t even a minute; but in it she had gone the whole round of my thoughts.

“‘It’s raining,’ she said, very low. ‘I suppose you can telephone for a trap?’

“There was no irony or resentment in her voice. She walked slowly across the room and paused before the Brangwyn etching over there. ‘That’s a good impression. Will you telephone, please?’ she repeated.

“I found my voice again, and with it the power of movement. I followed her and dropped at her feet. ‘You can’t go like this!’ I cried.

“She looked down on me from heights and heights. ‘I can’t stay like this,’ she answered.

“I stood up and we faced each other like antagonists. ‘You don’t know,’ I accused her passionately, ‘in the least what you’re asking me to ask of you!’

“‘Yes, I do: everything,’ she breathed.

“‘And it’s got to be that or nothing?’

“‘Oh, on both sides,’ she reminded me.

“‘Not on both sides. It’s not fair. That’s why–‘

“‘Why you won’t?’

“‘Why I cannot–may not!’

“‘Why you’ll take a night and not a life?’

“The taunt, for a woman usually so sure of her aim, fell so short of the mark that its only effect was to increase my conviction of her helplessness. The very intensity of my longing for her made me tremble where she was fearless. I had to protect her first, and think of my own attitude afterward.