"No, no, don't leave me. Stay with me, do stay with me. Why can't I always have you with me? Why shouldn't I? How cruel it is!" She was almost sobbing. "Ashley, don't go," she whispered.
"Well, I won't go," he said. "I'll stay and dine with you and take you to the theatre."
"And fetch me home afterwards?"
"No, I don't think I'll do that as well."
"Why not?" she asked resentfully. Ashley shook his head. After a long look at him Ora sighed deeply. "I suppose you'd better not," she admitted. "But you'll stay now, won't you?" She ran across to the bell and rang it; her tone was gay as she told Janet that Mr. Mead would dine with her; between being left now and being left two hours hence a gulf of difference yawned.
"I'm afraid there's not much dinner, ma'am," said Janet in a discouraging, perhaps a disapproving, way.
"Oh, you won't mind that, will you?" she cried to Ashley, and when Janet went out she sighed, "It's so nice to have you." His smile had mockery in it as well as love. "It's for such a little while too," she went on. "Presently I shan't have you at all."
The little meal that they took together—Ashley ignoring an engagement to dine with friends, Ora seeming unmindful of things much harder to forget—was not a sorrowful feast. The shadow of the great renunciation did not eclipse Ora's gaiety, but tempered it with a soft tenderness. None of her many phases had charmed her friend more; never had she seemed stronger in her claim on his service, more irresistible in the weakness with which she rested her life on his. His taste, his theoretical taste, had not been for women of this type, but rather, as he used to put it, for a woman with a backbone, a woman like Alice Muddock; theoretical preferences exist to be overthrown.
The unpretentious "jobbed" victoria was waiting at the door, and at last Ora made up her mind to start. It was but a little after seven, the streets were still light and full. The beginning of the renunciation might have seemed a strange one to the passer-by who recognised the occupants of the victoria. Many looked at Ora, thinking they had seen her before; some certainly knew her, some also knew Ashley. In reply to a not very serious expostulation from her companion Ora declared that it did not matter if people gossipped a little, because her announcement would put an end to it all directly; meanwhile shouldn't they enjoy themselves while they could? "If you hadn't taken me to the theatre to-night, I could never have got there," she declared with conviction. Ashley knew quite well that this was not literal truth and that she would have gone anyhow; whatever had happened to her, her instinct would have taken her; but the untruth had a truth in it and she thought it all true. It was an instance of the way in which she had put herself in his hands, had told him what she wanted him to do with her, and was now leaving him to do it. He had, in a slang phrase which came into his mind, "to see her through;" he had to ensure that the great renunciation should be properly carried out. It was consoling, although no doubt somewhat whimsical, that the renunciation should seem to excuse what but for it would have been condemned as an imprudence, and, while dooming them to ultimate separation, should excuse or justify them in being as much together as they could in the present. It was "only for a little while;" the coming of Jack Fenning would end their pleasant hours and silence those who cavilled at them. The consciousness of their approaching virtue bred in Ora, and even in Ashley to some degree, both a sense of security and a tendency to recklessness; it seemed as though they had had no reason to fear either themselves or other people.
"You might come and fetch me afterwards," she said coaxingly.