‘Paul dear,’ said the Baroness, ‘I did not think that you would have felt our parting like this. We can’t help it, we literary people—we must quote, we must express the profoundest feelings of our souls in the words of other people. What’s the Shakespearian line? “I hold it good that we shake hands and part”, Good-bye, Paul.’
He was on his feet again, and they were hand in hand. Her left hand was on his right shoulder. Their eyes met and lingered on each other.
‘We’re saying good-bye, Paul,’ purred the Baroness in a voice of tenderest cadence. ‘You see the need for it, don’t you, you dear boy? Perhaps we may see each other later on, but it is good-bye now, for the time being. It must be so. You see that, don’t you, Paul dear?
‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘I see it. Who could fail to see it? You shall have my thanks when I can offer them for having asked no explanation, no apology.’
‘Paul,’ said the Baroness, and the left hand on his right shoulder drew him a little nearer to her. Once, a year or two before, he had been up in the Yorkshire dales, and had strolled along by the side of the Wharfe on a day when the river ran beryl-brown or sapphire clear as it glanced over pebbly shallow or rocky depth. There was the beryl glint in her eye—the darling brown with the liquid light playing upon it. He looked now. The woodlands were about him; the river murmured near. The damnable artistic gift which made use of all accomplished experience helped him to obey the impulse of the slow, persuasive hand. The beryl light in the eyes invited him, and the faint droop of languishing eyelid did the rest ‘Paul dear,’ she whispered, ‘it is good-bye. You may kiss me just this once and go. Kiss me, Paul dear, as you would kiss your mother’s ghost, and go.’
He stooped and kissed her, reverently and lingeringly, upon the forehead.
‘Good-bye,’ he said—‘good-bye.’
Then, with an electric amazement, her lips were on his for a single instant, and she strained him near to her.
‘Now, go,’ she said, withdrawing herself before he had found time to answer her embrace. ‘Go, and farewell!’
He was in the upper corridor almost before he knew it, in the confusion of his nerves. The key snapped quickly in the lock, and he was alone. He groped his way along the darkened passage until he reached the head of the stairs, and there he recovered some consciousness of fact. He drooped slowly down into his study, and sat there in the dark and cold for hours, swearing fealty to contradictory deities of passion and of friendship.