She saw it. “Don’t be troubled about me,” she said. “I didn’t want to die—really, I didn’t want to at all. It was only because just at that moment I could not bear it to have you keep asking me when it was impossible,—I felt that I must go away; and apart from you, and Cicely and baby, there seemed no place in the world for me! But now—now I want to live. Perhaps we shall both live long lives.”
“I’m not a woman, you know,” said Paul, with a faint smile. “Women do with make-believes; men can’t.”
She had left him. “Go now,” she said.
He turned to obey. Then he came back. “Eve, can’t you tell me your real reason?”
But her face changed so quickly to its old look of agony that he felt a pang of regret that he had spoken. “I will never ask you again,” he said.
This was the offering he made her—a great one for Paul Tennant. He went away.
An hour later she came back to the camp.
“Paul has gone to Potterpins,” said Hollis, who was sitting by the fire. “Told me to give you this.” He handed her a note.
It contained but two lines: “I shall come back next week. But send a note by mail; I want to know if you are contented with me.”
Eve wrote but one word—“Yes.”