London. And perhaps
in the end she might shelve him. At any rate, she could temporize.
"I've never been at Maidenhead."

"And lunch at Skindle's isn't at all bad."

"I've never been at Skindle's."

"And after lunch we'll go out on the river--the Clieveden woods, you
know--and all that."

"I've never seen the Clieveden woods."

"Then that's settled. At eleven. All right, driver; go on."

But she stretched her hands toward him. "Oh, Chip, don't come! I'm
afraid. What's the good? Since we've burned our bridges--"

He had just time to say: "Even without bridges, there are wings. At
eleven, then. All right, driver; go on. The Ritz Hotel."

V

PENALTY

He went to Berne because she had let slip the name of that place during
the afternoon at Maidenhead. It was the only hint of the kind she threw
out during the afternoons--four in all--they passed together. He forgot
the connection in which they came, but he retained the words: "He may
have to go to Berne."

_He_ was between them as an awesome presence, never mentioned otherwise
than allusively. His name was too sinister to speak. Each thought of him
unceasingly, in silence, and with anguish; but, as far as possible, they
kept him out of their intercourse. It was enough to know that he was
there, a fearful authority in the background, able to summon her from
this brief renewal of old happiness, as Pluto could recall Eurydice.

It was the supremacy of this power, which they themselves had placed in
his hands, that in the end drove Chip Walker to wondering what he was
like.

"What _is_ he like?" he found the force to ask.

She looked distressed. "He's a good man."

He nerved himself to come to a point at which he had long been aiming:
"Look here, Edith! Why did you marry him?"

"Do you mean, why did I marry him in particular, or why did I marry any
one?"

"I mean both."

"Oh, I don't know. There--there seemed to be reasons."

That was at Tunbridge Wells--in the twilight, on the terrace of the old
Calverly Hotel. They were sitting under a great hawthorn in full bloom.
The air was sweet with the scent of it. It was sweet, too, with the
scent of flowers and of new-mown hay. In a tree at the edge of the
terrace a blackbird was singing to a faint crescent moon. There was
still enough daylight to show the shadows deepening toward Bridge and
over Broadwater Down, while on the sloping crest of Bishop's Down Common
human figures appeared of gigantic size a