remember every word
they said, there in the warm moonlight.

"What a silly boy you are!"

"I don't care. I shall always say exactly the same. I can't help it."

"All silly boys say that sort of thing. Then they change their minds."

"I never said it to any girl in my life but you, Rosey. I never thought
it. I shall never say it again to any one but you."

"Don't be nonsensical!"

"I'm _not_! It's _true_."

"Wait till you've been six months in India, Gerry."

And then the recollection of what followed made it seem infinitely
strange to her that Fenwick should remain, as he had remained,
immovable. If the hand she could remember so well, for all it had
grown so scarred and service-worn and hairy, were to take hers as it
did then, as they sat together on the garden-seat, would it shake now
as formerly? If his great strong arm her memory still felt round her
were to come again now, would she feel in it the tremor of the passion
he was shaken by then; and in caresses such as she half reproved him
for, but had no heart to resist, the reality of a love then young and
strong and full of promise for the days to come? And now--what? The
perished trunk of an uprooted tree: the shadow of a half-forgotten
dream.

As he sat silent, only now and then by some slight sign, some new
knitting of the brow or closing of the hand, showing the tension of the
feeling produced by the version his mind had made of the story half
told to him--as he sat thus, under a kind of feint of listening to
the music, the world grew stranger and stranger to his companion. She
had fancied herself strong enough to tell the story, but had hardly
reckoned with his possible likeness to himself. She had thought that
she could keep the twenty years that had passed clearly in her mind;
could deal with the position from a good, sensible, matter-of-fact
standpoint.

The past was past, and happily forgotten by him. The present had still
its possibilities, if only the past might remain forgotten. Surely she
could rely on herself to find the nerve to go through what was, after
all, a mere act of duty. Knowing, or rather feeling, that Fenwick would
ask her to marry him as soon as he dared--it was merely a question of
time--her duty was plainly to forewarn him--to make sure that he was
alive to the antecedents of the woman he was offering himself to. She
knew _his_ antecedents; as many as she wished to know. If the twenty
years of oblivion concealed irregulari