r.

"Go away," I said to the servant, seeing that Marion had followed me
down.

I felt her standing behind me as I spoke to the cab man.

I got into the cab, resolutely not looking back, and then as it started
jumped up, craned out and looked at the door.

It was wide open, but she had disappeared....

I wonder--I suppose she ran upstairs.

X

So I parted from Marion at an extremity of perturbation and regret, and
went, as I had promised and arranged, to Effie, who was waiting for me
in apartments near Orpington. I remember her upon the station platform,
a bright, flitting figure looking along the train for me, and our walk
over the fields in the twilight. I had expected an immense sense of
relief where at last the stresses of separation were over, but now
I found I was beyond measure wretched and perplexed, full of the
profoundest persuasion of irreparable error. The dusk and somber Marion
were so alike, her sorrow seemed to be all about me. I had to hold
myself to my own plans, to remember that I must keep faith with Effie,
with Effie who had made no terms, exacted no guarantees, but flung
herself into my hands.

We went across the evening fields in silence, towards a sky of deepening
gold and purple, and Effie was close beside me always, very close,
glancing up ever and again at my face.

Certainly she knew I grieved for Marion, that ours was now no joyful
reunion. But she showed no resentment and no jealousy. Extraordinarily,
she did not compete against Marion. Never once in all our time together
did she say an adverse word of Marion....

She set herself presently to dispel the shadow that brooded over me with
the same instinctive skill that some women will show with the trouble
of a child. She made herself my glad and pretty slave and handmaid; she
forced me at last to rejoice in her. Yet at the back of it all Marion
remained, stupid and tearful and infinitely distressful, so that I was
almost intolerably unhappy for her--for her and the dead body of my
married love.

It is all, as I tell it now, unaccountable to me. I go back into these
remote parts, these rarely visited uplands and lonely tares of memory,
and it seems to me still a strange country. I had thought I might be
going to some sensuous paradise with Effie, but desire which fills the
universe before its satisfaction, vanishes utterly like the going of
daylight--with achievement. All the facts and forms of life remain
darkling and cold. It