he morning," she repeated.

She continued to stand in the same place, looking vaguely about the
room. For once before they parted--since part they must--she longed to
be to him all that Sophy Viner had been; but she remained rooted to the
floor, unable to find a word or imagine a gesture that should express
her meaning. Exasperated by her helplessness, she thought: "Don't I feel
things as other women do?"

Her eye fell on a note-case she had given him. It was worn at the
corners with the friction of his pocket and distended with thickly
packed papers. She wondered if he carried her letters in it, and she put
her hand out and touched it.

All that he and she had ever felt or seen, their close encounters
of word and look, and the closer contact of their silences, trembled
through her at the touch. She remembered things he had said that had
been like new skies above her head: ways he had that seemed a part of
the air she breathed. The faint warmth of her girlish love came back
to her, gathering heat as it passed through her thoughts; and her heart
rocked like a boat on the surge of its long long memories. "It's because
I love him in too many ways," she thought; and slowly she turned to the
door.

She was aware that Darrow was still silently watching her, but he
neither stirred nor spoke till she had reached the threshold. Then he
met her there and caught her in his arms.

"Not to-night--don't tell me to-night!" he whispered; and she leaned
away from him, closing her eyes for an instant, and then slowly opening
them to the flood of light in his.

XXXVII

Anna and Darrow, the next day, sat alone in a compartment of the Paris
train.

Anna, when they entered it, had put herself in the farthest corner
and placed her bag on the adjoining seat. She had decided suddenly to
accompany Darrow to Paris, had even persuaded him to wait for a later
train in order that they might travel together. She had an intense
longing to be with him, an almost morbid terror of losing sight of him
for a moment: when he jumped out of the train and ran back along the
platform to buy a newspaper for her she felt as though she should never
see him again, and shivered with the cold misery of her last journey
to Paris, when she had thought herself parted from him forever. Yet she
wanted to keep him at a distance, on the other side of the compartment,
and as the train moved out of the station she drew from her bag the
letters she had thrus