Nora made coffee at the table, but they drank it seated in great easy chairs drawn up to the fire. She passed him silently a box of his favourite brand of cigarettes. Perhaps that evidence of her forethought, the mute resignation of her restrained conversation with its attempted note of cheerfulness forced its way through the chinks of his unnatural armour. His whole face suddenly softened. He leaned across and took her fingers into his.
"Dear Nora," he sighed, "what a brute I must seem to you and how difficult it is for me to try and tell you all that is in my heart!"
"All tasks that are worth attempting are difficult," she murmured.
"Please go on."
"They are such simple things that I feel," he began, "simple and yet contradictory. I should miss you more out of my life than any other person. I shall resent from my very soul the man who takes you from me. And yet I know what life is, dear. I know how inexorable are its decrees. You have a fancy for me, born of kindness and sympathy, because you know that I am a little lonely. In our thoughts, too, we live so much in the same world. That is just one of the ironies of life, Nora. Our thoughts can move linked together through all the flowery and beautiful places of the world, but our bodies—alas, dear! Do you know how old I really am?"
"I know how young you are," she answered, with a little choke in her throat.
"I am fifty-four years old," he went on. "I am in the last lap of physical well-being, even though my mind should continue to flourish. And you are—how much younger! I dare not think."
"Idiot!" she exclaimed. "At fifty-four you are better and stronger than half the men of forty."
"I have good health," he admitted, "but no constitution or manner of living is of any account against the years. In six years' time I shall be sixty years old."
She leaned a little towards him. Now once more the light was coming back into her eyes. If that was the only thing with him!
"In twelve years' time from now," she said, "I, too, shall turn over a chapter, the chapter of my youth. What is time but a relative thing? Who shall measure your six years against my twelve? The years that count in the life of a man or a woman are the measure of their happiness."