He paused a moment; then seemed suddenly to realize that he had said all that could be said.... A little wind drove upwards from the plain below, fluttering the papers which had held their sandwiches. Joyce hated herself for noticing that. Then she tried to withdraw her hand.
"Oh I am so sorry, so sorry," she said. "It is quite impossible, more impossible than ever. I mean—I don't know what I mean. But I can't."
She knew very well what she meant when she said "more impossible than ever." And mixed with her regret which was wholly genuine, was a sort of nausea of her soul.... Once more she felt she knew who had spoken to her father of Charles. The motive, too, was as clear as the sunshine. She loathed this continued contact. But it only lasted a second more. The tone of her reply would have carried conviction to the most ardent of lovers. He dropped her hand.
"I have done," he said.
He got up, and walked a few paces away, and stood there with his back to her. A quantity of disconnected pictures went through the blank impassivity of his mind. He remembered the look of the green packet of tickets for their passage down the Nile to-morrow, which he had seen on his table before he went out this morning. He heard Philip's voice say, "Take care of my little Joyce!" He felt himself licking the envelope which contained Mr. Ward's cheque for five thousand pounds. He had the vision of another cheque for ten thousand and one hundred pounds. He saw the sketch of Joyce that had stood beneath the lamp in her room on the evening the chimneys smoked at the Mill House. He heard himself console Charles for the "queer note" Philip Wroughton had written him. Collectively, these presented their whole case, his whole connection with the Wroughtons, succinctly and completely. And the curtain fell on them.
He went back to Joyce, who was sitting by the side of the fluttering paper with her head in her hands.
"What would you like to do?" he said. "Shall we take our ride into the desert or go home?"
Joyce got up.
"Oh, let us go home," she said. "Please call Mohammed. And do realize I am sorry, I am very sorry."
But there was nothing in him now that could respond to or help the girl's evident distress. It seemed that the wonderful flower that grew out of him had been plucked.... Only the soil out of which it grew remained, and that was exactly what it had always been.