ly beginning to realise in the most
superficial way the immense catastrophe that had happened between us.
Enormous issues had rushed upon us. I felt unprepared and altogether
inadequate. I was unreasonably angry. There came a rush of stupid
expressions to my mind that my rising sense of the supreme importance
of the moment saved me from saying. The gap of silence widened until
it threatened to become the vast memorable margin of some one among a
thousand trivial possibilities of speech that would vex our relations
for ever.

Our little general servant tapped at the door--Marion always liked the
servant to tap--and appeared.

"Tea, M'm," she said--and vanished, leaving the door open.

"I will go upstairs," said I, and stopped. "I will go upstairs" I
repeated, "and put my bag in the spare room."

We remained motionless and silent for a few seconds.

"Mother is having tea with us to-day," Marion remarked at last, and
dropped the worried end of ball-fringe and stood up slowly....

And so, with this immense discussion of our changed relations hanging
over us, we presently had tea with the unsuspecting Mrs. Ramboat and
the spaniel. Mrs. Ramboat was too well trained in her position to remark
upon our somber preoccupation. She kept a thin trickle of talk going,
and told us, I remember, that Mr. Ramboat was "troubled" about his
cannas.

"They don't come up and they won't come up. He's been round and had an
explanation with the man who sold him the bulbs--and he's very heated
and upset."

The spaniel was a great bore, begging and doing small tricks first at
one and then at the other of us. Neither of us used his name. You see
we had called him Miggles, and made a sort of trio in the baby-talk of
Mutney and Miggles and Ming.

VIII

Then presently we resumed our monstrous, momentous dialogue. I can't now
make out how long that dialogue went on. It spread itself, I know,
in heavy fragments over either three days or four. I remember myself
grouped with Marion, talking sitting on our bed in her room, talking
standing in our dining-room, saving this thing or that. Twice we went
for long walks. And we had a long evening alone together, with jaded
nerves and hearts that fluctuated between a hard and dreary recognition
of facts and, on my part at least, a strange unwonted tenderness;
because in some extraordinary way this crisis had destroyed our mutual
apathy and made us feel one another again.

It was a dialogue that ha