Rather a jest, eh, what?"

"Rather," he said.

And it was really the same room--a fire burning and the faun dancing in
the midst of its moving shadows. There was a faint, warm scent of
cigarette smoke and a solemn pile of books beside her deep chair. It
wouldn't be like Francey to rest under her laurels.

She held both his hands in hers. She wore a loose, golden-brown
wrapper such as she had always worn when she had been working hard.
She had changed very little and a great deal. If something of the
whimsical mysteriousness of her youth had faded she had broadened and
deepened into a woman warm and generous as the earth. Her thick hair
swept back from her face with the old wind-blown look, and her eyes
were candid and steadfast as they had ever been. But some sort of mist
had been brushed away from them so that they saw more clearly and
profoundly. He thought: "She has seen a great many people suffer. She
doesn't go away so often into herself."

He had tried hard, over and over again, to imagine their meeting, but
he had never imagined that it would be so simple or that she would say
to him, as though the eight years had not happened:

"Why didn't you tell me about Christine, Robert?"

He said:

"It wouldn't have made any difference."

"I've been waiting for you to tell me."

He tried to smile.

"You don't know how difficult it has been to come. I've been prowling
past--night after night--trying to think what you'd say to me, if I
turned up."

"You might have known."

"I didn't--I don't know even now."

She had made him sit down by the fire and she sat opposite him, bending
towards him, with her slim, beautiful hands to the blaze. He felt that
she knew, for all the outward signs of his prosperity, that he was
destitute. He felt that his real self with which she had always been
so much concerned had been stripped naked, and that she was trying to
warm and console him. She was wrapping him round with that unchanged
tenderness.

"It's--it's the old room!" he said.

But his enmity was dead. He was at peace with it. He had been
initiated. He had heard, very faintly it is true, but loud enough to
understand, the music to which the faun danced. He was not the
outsider any more.

"I wanted it to be the same."

"And the house----"

"I took it as soon as I could get it. I made up my mind to live here,
whatever it cost. You see, I was quite sure that you would go past one
of these days