"Oh!" she said, "I get out here. Good-bye, good-bye."
He would not spoil the parting by banalities of hat-raising amid the group of friends or relations who would doubtless meet her.
"Good-bye," he said, and his eyes made her take his offered hand. "Good-bye. I shall never forget you. Never!"
And then it seemed to him that the farewell lacked fire: and he lifted her hand to his face. He did not kiss it. He laid it against his cheek, sighed, and dropped it. The action was delicate and very effective. It suggested the impulse, almost irresistible yet resisted, the well-nigh overwhelming longing to kiss the hand, kept in check by a respect that was almost devotion.
She should have torn her hand away. She took it away gently, and went.
Leisurely he got out of the train. She had disappeared. Well—the bright little interlude was over. Still, it would give food for dreams among the ferny woods. The first lines of a little song hummed themselves in his brain—
"Eyes like stars in the night of life,
Seen but a moment and seen for ever."
He would finish them and send them to the Pall Mall Gazette. That would be a guinea.
He wished the journey had been longer. He would never see her again. Perhaps it was just as well. He crushed that last thought. It would be good to dwell through the day on the thought of her—the almost loved, the wholly lost.