He repeated it several times.
She watched him wander oddly about the room, thinking aloud rather than speaking to her. How different he had become. For the first time it dawned upon her that the whole look of the man had undergone a change. He held himself with less affectation. His petulance had gone. He was like a Gilbert Palgrave who had been ill and had come out of it with none of his old arrogance.
He took up a cigarette and began wandering again, muttering her unfortunate word. She was sorry to have hurt his feelings. It was the very last thing that she had wanted to do. "Aren't there any matches?" she asked. "Ring for some."
She was impatient of indecision.
He drew up and looked at her. "Ring? Why? No one will come."
"Are we the only people in the house, then?"
"Yes," he said. "That's part of my plan."
"Plan?" She was on her feet. "What do you mean? Have you thought all this out and made a scheme of it?"
"Yes; all out," he said. "The moment has come, Joan."
No longer did the scent of honeysuckle take Joan back to the sun-bathed cottage and the voice behind the door. No longer did she feel that all this wasn't really happening, that it was fantastic. Stark reality forced itself upon her and brought her into the present as though some one had turned up all the lights in a dark room. She was alone with the man whom she had driven to the limit of his patience. No one knew that she was there. It was a trick into which she had fallen out of a new wish to be kind. A sense of self-preservation scattered the dire effects of everything that had happened during the afternoon. She must get out, quickly. She made for the door.