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I was silent. I was bewildered for one thing, and I did not want “to put my foot in it” again immediately for another. And there was really no need for me to speak, for he went on slowly, looking full at me:

“What I have to do, if I can, is to save Emmy’s romance for her.”

I could only stare at him.

“For twenty-five years,” he went on, “that dear woman has lived on her love for me. It has coloured her whole life. I know what I know. It has been her support in all the endless years she nursed that cruel old egoist her father, who would not let her marry me, when we could have married, seventeen years ago. But it is not me that she wants now, though she did want me for many years; it is the thought of me–if you can’t understand without my saying it, I can’t make you–it’s her romance which is important to her, and which I want her to keep, at all costs.”

“My darling Emmy,” he said, and there were tears in his hawk eyes, “the most unselfish and devoted, the sweetest, the humblest, and the most beautiful creature I have ever known. And she has given up everything out of constancy to me, home, children, everything; no, not for me exactly, but for a dream, for an ideal, for something of which I was to her the symbol, but which I no more resemble than I resemble that frond of bracken.”

He turned his face away.

“It would have been all right if they would have let us marry when we were both still young, and I had got a home together,” he went on; “but now it would be inhuman to root her out of her little home and drag her across the world, and try to transplant her into my rough place. How rough it is I see, now that I have been back in England. I did not know it was so uncouth when I lived in it. It’s the only life I’m accustomed to, the only life I’m fit for now, though it was sorely against the grain at first. I don’t think I could have stuck to it, except for the hope of marrying her some day. But I see now the only life I’m fit for is not fit for her. And I can’t give it up. I can’t desert my poor old uncle, who is growing infirm and depends on me entirely.”

“Why did you come back?” I groaned.

“I came back,” he said, “because I have cared for her and worked for her all my life. And because I heard that her beast of a father had left her almost penniless, and that fat Tom had married and turned her out. And until I saw her again from day to day I did not realise the nature of her feeling for me. I came back to offer her what I had, not that it was much, hoping to marry her and take her back with me…. But that is not what would make my Emmy happy now. What she needs is to go on in this perfect little doll’s house, this little haven, thinking of me, and praying for me, and tending her flowers, and mourning like a dove in its tree because we are parted.”

It was exactly what Aunt Emmy needed. I could not have put it into words, but this strange man had done so.

“You will not speak,” he said, “but you agree with me for all that. I had to make sure you agreed. Your confirmation is all I wanted, and now I have it.”

It was not that I would not speak. I could not speak. I was thinking of the room in that horrid wooden house which he had built for her.

After a few minutes he went on quietly:

“I think the thing for me to do is to be ruined, only partially, of course, not enough to make her miserable, and to hurry back to Australia without her at once for the time being, and from there to write regularly by every mail, nice letters (they cannot be forbidden now); but never to come back any more. A bank has just failed in Australia in which I had money. The situation can be arranged.”

I looked away from him.

“I owe it to her,” he said.