"Good-bye!" he repeated. "You are going away?"
"To-morrow. Oh! I am glad. You don't know how glad I am."
She swept past him and sank into an easy-chair. She wore a black velveteen evening dress, cut rather high, without ornament or relief of any sort, and her neck gleamed like polished ivory from which creeps always a subtle shade of pink. Her hair was parted in the middle and brushed back in little waves, her eyes were full of fire, and her face was no longer passive. Beautiful she had seemed to him before, but beautiful with a sort of impersonal perfection. She was beautiful now in her own right, the beauty of a woman whom nature has claimed for her own, who acknowledges her heritage. The fear-frozen subjectivity in which he had yet found enough to fascinate him had passed away. He felt that she was a stranger.
"Always," she murmured, "I shall think of London as the city of dreadful memories. I should like to be going to set my face eastwards or westwards until I was so far away that even memory had perished. But that is just where the bonds tell, isn't it?"
"There are many who can make the bonds elastic," he answered. "It is only a question of going far enough."
"Alas!" she answered, "a few hundred miles are all that are granted to me. And London is like a terrible octopus. Its arms stretch over the sea."
"A few hundred miles," he repeated, with obvious relief. "Northward or southward, or eastward or westward?"
"Southward," she answered. "The other side of the Channel. That, at least, is something. I always like to feel that there is sea between me and a place which I—loathe!"
"Is London so hateful to you, then?" he asked.
"Perhaps I should not have said that," she answered. "Say a place of which I am afraid!"