If he turns round at the door and says, "Alex!" She tried to cheat herself with a hope that was yet not a hope.
Noel turned at the door.
In a solemn, magnanimous voice he said:
"Alex! I don't want you to feel—ever—that you need reproach yourself, whatever any one may say. Remember that, if"—he suddenly looked like a rather frightened little boy—"if there's a great fuss."
Then the door closed very quietly behind him, and Alex heard him go downstairs slowly.
It seemed to her that Noel's farewell had plumbed the final depth of his inadequacy.
Presently she sank into an armchair before the fire, and tried to visualize the effects of her own action.
She was principally conscious of a certain amazement, that a step which seemed likely to have such far-reaching consequences should have been so largely the result of sudden impulse. She had not thought the night before of breaking off her engagement. It had all happened very quickly in a few minutes, when the sense of tension which had hung round her intercourse with Noel had suddenly seemed to reach an unbearable pitch, so that something had snapped. Was this how Important Things happened to one through life?
Alex felt that she could not believe it.
But a broken engagement—could there be anything more important, more desperate? Alex felt with melancholy satisfaction that at least it was real life, as she had always imagined it, full of drama and tragedy. With, of course, a glory of happiness as final climax, that would make up for everything.... More physically tired than she knew, Alex abandoned herself dreamily to the old, idle visions of the wonderful, perfect love that should come to crown her life. There was no faint, latent sense of disloyalty to Noel now, in returning to her old dreams, that had been hers in one form or another ever since her childish ideal of a perfect friend who would always understand, and yet love one just the same.