He was sitting on a stool—but not of repentance—at her feet, on the evening before his departure. The stoep was their usual sitting-room, and they had gathered there after dinner for desultory chat, Mrs. Gilderoy swinging her small compact body in the paintless remains of a rocking-chair, Mrs. Lewin leaning back against as many cushions as Rennie could find for her basket-work lounge, Rennie himself with his back to one of the pillars of the stoep, and his hands clasped round his knees. He had ridden down into the valley that afternoon with Mrs. Lewin to see the sugar factory, and while becoming a little heady with the changing colours of her eyes, he did not know that the smell of the rich sugar brought back the day she went over Denver’s, and that a ghost walked by her in his place and pointed out all the transformations of the cane to her, from the crushing and ejection of the waste for fuel, to the last refinement and glittering heaps waiting to be bagged. The dark, luscious-smelling place was a dream of sugar, but the two who wandered about among its thunderous machinery were thinking of an alien sweetness.
“I must write a note to my good man for you to take back with you,” Mrs. Gilderoy remarked after a time, and she went into the bungalow to do it. Mrs. Lewin and Rennie sat silent. She did not notice that he was plaiting a frill of her gown between his confident fingers; his presence was as little to her as the fireflies and lamp-beetles starring the grass, for she was thinking of Ally. It was one of her hours of remorse when an intolerable sense of responsibility for the ceasing of his strong young vitality bowed her with irresistible force. At such moments she would have sacrificed all her after life to his memory, and done penance because she felt herself the indirect cause of a fate she could not foresee. When she was less morbid she saw that even a strong woman cannot stand between a weak man and the consequence of his own actions, but her torturing conscience accused her of complicity with Gregory because for the space of some weeks she had allowed herself to be happy. At such moments she did not plead innocence of any participation in his darker plans; she felt that to expiate her own sin she must sacrifice both herself and him for all the years of strong life that lay before them.
“I wish I knew you better, Mrs. Lewin,” Rennie said suddenly.
“Why?” she asked, coming back to the present with a start. She looked down at his young good looks and audacious eyes, and realised that he had been playing with her gown, which she quietly drew away.
“I should so like to call you by your Christian name,” said Rennie, with the happy safety of his youth. Women never snubbed him very severely, because the flushed colour of his face suggested the school-boy still.
Leoline smiled a little whimsically. “That is the disadvantage of going by a general nickname,” she said good-naturedly, supposing that the compromising “Chum” on so many lips had tempted him.
“Oh, I don’t mean your nickname,” he said somewhat loftily. “Every one uses that—all the women, at least. They have made it common. But I envy Gurney when he sings that song about you.” He began to hum “Leoline.”
“We sang our songs together till the stars shook in the skies—
We spoke—we spoke of common things, but the tears were in our eyes.
And my hand I know it trembled to each light, warm touch of thine—