ly, stammering flow, till it, as usual, choked itself
and died.

She heard it out in silence--as always. This silent hearing was the
carrying out of what had from the first constituted their intercourse.
For always he had talked and she had heard; Betty had once quite failed
to accept Tommy's assertion that it was ever 'the other way round.' But
the silence seemed now to hold a new element--the element of
receptiveness. She listened wholly, swerving from nothing. It seemed
that here was his triumph, long striven for; he had sounded the personal
note and she had accepted it; in a manner, he had broken through the
gates.

When the stammered flow broke, she continued the silence for a little.
Then she assented to his last phrase, saying, very gently:

'No--I can't say anything. There is nothing to say.'

The sad, judicial candour of it set the seal on the position. If he had
still wildly, faintly hoped that she had not, perhaps, seen so utterly
'how they stood, how they must always stand,' that hope died then. He
had divined so much correctly; there might even, perhaps, be more of
it, that it would take some years yet to divine.

The glow of the coloured city made his eyes ache as he looked.

He said again, what seemed to be the final expression of the situation
between them, this time altering the pronoun:

'There is nothing I can say.'

All he might have said, all he now knew that he would have said, had
they stood differently in each other's eyes, all that it would have
been, as they did stand, an insolence to say, seemed to lie in the
silence between them. Since she was (now) so receptive, she possibly
took it in, or a little of it. But 'there is nothing to say' finally
summed the situation.

Tommy stammered 'Good-bye,' and went.

The Crevequers had supper at home and alone together that evening. Over
it Tommy said nothing at all, and Betty talked without a break for the
edification of the two of them. After supper Tommy lit a pipe and began
to work at some sketches. Betty, in the other arm-chair, counted pence
in a money-box for the week's rent.

'It would be too much to expect that it should be right, of course,' she
murmured, 'But w-why it should be eighty centesimi out, I can't
understand.'

Then she looked up and met Tommy's eyes. All his sharp hurt was in them;
they were heavy with a bitter, dumb hopelessness. If she had known it,
her own eyes looked with the same heaviness, the same sharp hurt. Th