otion every woman, it may be, hides. She had read of love,
she had thought of love, a thousand sweet lyrics had sounded through her
brain and left fine fragments in her memory; she poured it out, all
of it, shamelessly, skilfully, for me. I cannot give any sense of that
talk, I cannot even tell how much of the delight of it was the magic of
her voice, the glow of her near presence. And always we walked swathed
warmly through a chilly air, along dim, interminable greasy roads--with
never a soul abroad it seemed to us, never a beast in the fields.

"Why do people love each other?" I said.

"Why not?"

"But why do I love you? Why is your voice better than any voice, your
face sweeter than any face?"

"And why do I love you?" she asked; "not only what is fine in you,
but what isn't? Why do I love your dullness, your arrogance? For I do.
To--night I love the very raindrops on the fur of your coat!"...

So we talked; and at last very wet, still glowing but a little tired,
we parted at the garden door. We had been wandering for two hours in our
strange irrational community of happiness, and all the world about us,
and particularly Lady Osprey and her household, had been asleep--and
dreaming of anything rather than Beatrice in the night and rain.

She stood in the doorway, a muffled figure with eyes that glowed.

"Come back," she whispered. "I shall wait for you."

She hesitated.

She touched the lapel of my coat. "I love you NOW," she said, and lifted
her face to mine.

I held her to me and was atremble from top to toe. "O God!" I cried.
"And I must go!"

She slipped from my arms and paused, regarding me. For an instant the
world seemed full of fantastic possibilities.

"Yes, GO!" she said, and vanished and slammed the door upon me, leaving
me alone like a man new fallen from fairyland in the black darkness of
the night.

III

That expedition to Mordet Island stands apart from all the rest of my
life, detached, a piece by itself with an atmosphere of its own. It
would, I suppose, make a book by itself--it has made a fairly voluminous
official report--but so far as this novel of mine goes it is merely an
episode, a contributory experience, and I mean to keep it at that.

Vile weather, an impatient fretting against unbearable slowness
and delay, sea--sickness, general discomfort and humiliating
self--revelation are the master values of these memories.

I was sick all through the journey out. I don't know why.