the table. Then she walked to the
window, touching the things she passed with a little caressing gesture.
He noticed that she picked up the unpointed pencil and he felt a little
desolate feeling, as if he had lost his only friend.

Suddenly, she turned round, "I am leaving England to-morrow," she said.

He shivered at her velvety voice, as he would have shivered had his hand
touched suede. "Well," his voice was too natural to be natural, "you
don't want to say good-bye to me again, do you?"

"Is there such a thing as 'good-bye,'" she mused; "won't this room
always be a part of my life? Can one end anything? A chapter, a
paragraph, a sentence even? Doesn't everything one has ever done go on
living in spite of subsequent events?"

Relentlessly he brought her down from her generalisations.

"You have ended my life," he said.

"Oh, no." She was sitting beside him on the sofa. Gently and tentatively
she put her hand on his. "Take it away," he said roughly, miserably,
conscious that he was behaving like a hero of melodrama, and then more
quietly, "can't you spare me anything?"

"I never could spare any one anything, could I? Not _even_ myself?"

He resisted the wistful pleading of her eyes, taking a savage pleasure
in their tired look. No doubt the preparations for her journey had
exhausted her. Her hand was lying limply on the arm of the sofa.

"What does it feel like to wear a wedding-ring?" he asked harshly.

"It feels so strange at first. One keeps catching sight of it and being
made to feel different by it. Somehow, it really matters, it really
seems to mean something."

"Indeed?" He was ashamed of the cheap cynicism of his tone. It wasn't
what he had meant to say.

She waited a few minutes and then she got up and put on her hat, deftly
arranging her veil with almost mechanical quickness and skill. Then she
pulled on her gloves. How well he knew the swift deliberateness of her
movements. Without turning round she left the room. He heard her go into
the dining-room.... A few minutes later, he heard her come out again. He
heard her open and shut the front door.... He went to the open window.
Would she look up? Surely that was the test of whether or not she was
still the same--the eternal. In the past, whatever had happened between
them, she had never been able to resist that final peep, half to see
whether he was there, half to send up a little tiny semi-binding glance
of reconciliation. Sometimes, when he had