She withdrew her hand from his, and stood staring at him with a baffling half-smile upon her lips. His heart sank, for it seemed to him that she was not minded to revive that dream of the past which to him had suddenly leapt once more into vivid reality.
“I have never forgotten,” he whispered, though he knew that the words needed qualification. “I knew it was you, almost before I saw your face.” He hesitated. “May I come into your garden?”
She allowed him to enter, and closed the door behind him. Together they walked in silence to a stone bench which stood in the moonlight beneath a dark cypress-tree; and here they seated themselves, side by side.
For a while they talked; but it was a sort of fencing with words, he thrusting and she parrying. He did not know what he said; for all his actual consciousness went out to her, not through speech, but through a kind of contact of their hidden hearts.
Then, without further preliminaries, she turned on him. “You say you have never forgotten,” she laughed. “But when you say that you are deceiving yourself, or trying to deceive me. I don’t like to hear you making conventional remarks, Jim: I have always thought of you as frank to the point of rudeness. Be frank with me now, and admit that you regarded our time together as a little episode in your wandering life, and that you went on your way without another thought for me....”
He interrupted her. “Was that how you felt about me?—you forgot me, too, didn’t you?”
“With a woman it is different,” she replied. “One is not always able to forget so soon.”
“But why didn’t you tell me your name, or give me some address?” he asked. “I wrote to you from the ship: I posted the letter at Marseilles. Didn’t you get it?”
“No,” she answered. “I stayed on at the Beaux-Esprits for a week or so, but nothing came. I left an address when I went away: I’m sure I did.”