“Well, we’ll break it for once,” he said. “Now you’re vexed with me. That’s very unreasonable of you. You made your choice with your eyes open. You’ve chosen Raymond and Stanier. It stands to reason we can’t always be together. You can’t have Raymond and Stanier and me. It was your own doing. And I thought everything was going so well. Whenever I look up I see you and him holding hands, or else he’s kissing the back of your neck.”
“Ah!” said Violet with a little shiver.
“You’ve got to get used to it, Vi,” said he. “You’ve got to pay for having Stanier. Isn’t it worth it?”
He heard her take a quick breath; her control was swaying like a curtain in the wind.
“Oh, don’t be such a brute to me, Colin,” she said. “I hadn’t realised that—that you would desert me like this.”
Colin just passed his tongue over his lips.
“Oh, that doesn’t mean anything to you,” he said.
“But it does, it does,” said she.
They were back now in the shadow of the yew-hedge, where one night she had kissed him. As he thought of that he knew that she was thinking of it too.
“Give Raymond up,” he said. “Let him and Stanier go. It will be the wisest thing you can do.”