There was another pause. Then:
“I can’t think,” she said, “why he didn’t come and tell me this himself.”
She said nothing more. Ralph saw no reason why he should remain any longer. He rose awkwardly to his feet. As he looked down at her, beaten and dejected, his love for her flamed up in him fiercely, and, with a sudden tenderness, he began to speak to her.
“April,” he said, “it’s been awful for me having to tell you this. I’ve hated hurting you—really I have. I know you don’t care for me, but if you would look on me as a friend, a real friend; if there’s anything I can do for you just now.... I can’t explain myself, but if you want anything I’ll do it. You’ll come to me, won’t you?”
She smiled at him, a tired, pathetic smile.
“All right, Ralph, I’ll remember.”
But the moment he had left the room all thought of him passed from her, and she was confronted with the gray, interminable prospect of a future without Roland. She could not believe that he was lost to her irretrievably. He would return to her. He must love her still. It was only two days since he had kissed her. He was marrying this girl for her money; that was why he had been ashamed to tell her of it himself. He would not have been ashamed if he had really loved this Muriel. Well, if it was money she would win him back. She was not afraid of poverty if Roland was with her; she would fight against it. She would earn money in little ways; she would do without a servant. His debts would be soon paid off. She would tell him this and he would return to her.
That evening she walked towards the Town Hall at the hour when he would be returning from the office. She had often gone to meet him without her mother’s knowledge, and they had walked together down the High Street in the winter darkness, his arm through hers. Bus after bus came up, emptied, and he was not there. She watched the people climbing down the stairs. She had decided that as soon as she saw Roland she would walk quietly down the street, as though she had not come purposely to meet him. She would thus take him off his guard. But, somehow, she missed the bus that he was on; perhaps a passing van had obscured her sight of it. And she did not realize that he was there till she saw him suddenly on the other side of the pavement. Their eyes met, Roland smiled, raised his hat and seemed about to come across to her; then he seemed to remember something, for he hurried quickly on and was lost almost at once in the dense, black-coated crowd of men returning from their office. The smile, the raising of the hat, had been an involuntary action. He had not remembered till he had taken that step forward that he had now no part in her life. He felt she would not want to speak to him now. And this action naturally confirmed April in her belief that Roland was marrying Muriel for her money.
“It is me that he loves really,” she told herself, and she felt that if she were a clever woman she would be able to win him back to her.
“But I am not a clever woman,” she said. “I was not made for intrigues and diplomacy.” She remembered how, four years earlier, she had learned from a similar experience that she was not destined for a life of action. “All my life,” she had told herself, “I shall have to wait, and Romance may come to me, or it may pass me by. But I shall be unable to go in search of it.” And it seemed to her that this fate had already been accomplished. Roland still loved her; that she could not doubt. But she had no means by which she might recall him to her. “If I had,” she said, “I should be a different woman, and, as likely as not, he would not love me.”