"It has been a long summer," she heard herself saying from a distance in a thin and colourless voice.
"And you suffered?"
"Sometimes, but I'm interested in my work, and I've been thinking and planning all summer."
For a moment he was silent, and though she did not look at him, she could feel his intense gaze on her face. The breeze, scented with rose geranium, touched her forehead like the healing and delicate stroke of his fingers.
"You are still so young, so vital, not to have something else in your life," he went on presently in a voice so charged with feeling that her eyes filled while she listened to it.
"I have had love, and I have my children."
"But you will love again? You will marry again some day?"
She shook her head, hearing, above the street cries and the muffled rumble of the elevated train, a voice that said: "I shall never give you up, Gabriella!" To her weakened nerves there appeared, with the vividness of an hallucination, the memory of Arthur as he had looked in her school-days when she had first loved him; and in this hallucination she saw him, not as he was in reality, but divinely glorified and enkindled by the light her imagination had created around him.
"No, I shall never love again, I shall never love again," she answered at last, while a feeling of exultation surged through her.
"You mean," his voice shook a little, "that your husband still holds you?"