e hurt no
one...."

"You will go?"

"To-day. Before sunset. Isn't it right that I should go?"

"Stay," she whispered, with a light in her eyes.

"No. I dare not."

She did not speak for a long time.

"Of course," she said at last, "you're right. You only said--I would
have said it for you if you had not. You're so right, Stephen.... I
suppose, poor silly little things, that if you stayed we should
certainly begin making love to each other. It would be--necessary. We
should fence about a little and then there it would be. No barrier--to
stop us. And neither of us wants it to happen. It isn't what we want.
You would become urgent, I suppose, and I should be--coquettish. In
spite of ourselves that power would make us puppets. As if already we
hadn't made love.... I could find it in my heart now.... Stephen I could
_make_ you stay....

"Oh! Why are we so tormented, Stephen? In the next world we shall meet,
and this will trouble us no longer. The love will be there--oh, the love
will be there, like something that has at last got itself fully born,
got itself free from some queer clinging seed-case....

"We shall be rid of jealousy, Stephen, that inflammation of the mind,
that bitterness, that pitiless sore, so that I shan't be tormented by
the thought of Rachel and she will be able to tolerate me. She was so
sweet and wonderful a girl--with those dark eyes. And I've never done
her justice--never. Nor she me. I snatched you from her. I snatched
you....

"Someday we shall be different.... All this putting oneself round
another person like a fence, against everyone else, almost against
everything else; it's so wicked, so fierce.

"It's so possible to be different. Sometimes now, sometimes for long
parts of a day I have no base passions at all--even in this life. To be
like that always! But I can't see clearly how these things can be; one
dreams of them in a kind of luminous mist, and if one looks directly at
them, they vanish again...."

Sec. 6

And at last we came to the landing, and moored the little boat and
walked up the winding path to the hotel. The dull pain of separation was
already upon us.

I think we had forgotten Miss Summersley Satchel altogether. But she
appeared as we sat down to tea at that same table at which we had
breakfasted, and joined us as a matter of course. Conceivably she found
the two animated friends of the morning had become rather taciturn.
Indeed there came a lapse of silence