"Even you can't make the awful loneliness go away," she said. "I must wait awhile before I can think about taking up life."
The next day she said to him: "You must go away now, and you must come back for me."
"You still think it possible?"
"For you to go away?"
"For me to come back."
"Possible? Inevitable!" She smiled up at him with an air of tender mockery. "No escape from me. But never forget"—she was grave enough now—"we may escape paying the penalty—people do."
He studied her a moment. No; she was thinking only of the natural "chance." No idea of trying to control it had come her way. "Nor could she comprehend," he thought, "how, even if I am wrong in my inveterate mistrust, or if science should to-morrow carry us so far that we should be demonstrably beyond the reach of danger—she could not realize that no power on earth or in the heavens could make us fully credit our security, could carry us beyond the reach of fear. Imagination is, by so much, mightier than reason. Trust imagination to keep the fear alive, to work without ceasing, by day and by night, subtly to destroy the fabric of our lives."
But even when the strong contagion of his fear had reached and mastered her a moment, it was fear with another face.
"I see plainly"—she laid her hands on his shoulders—"you think that it will mend matters if you have the treachery to go the long journey by yourself, and leave me alone in the world. But it would only mean that we should die apart, and now, when we might have died later and together, and—and"—she laid her face against him—"after great joy." He stroked her hair with an unsteady hand. "Look at me!" she cried on a sudden, lifting up her face. "You aren't afraid? Don't you see that I'd keep my word?"
"Yes, you'd keep your word."