“By Heaven, I do!” he interrupted, with a sudden outburst of bitterness. “I came home and looked around me—and wished that I were dead in the hopeless emptiness of it all!”
“No, dear, no!” she corrected him. “You came home and found me waiting for you in my prettiest dress and we had dinner together, just you and I alone, because the moment was so big that we couldn’t possibly share it with any one else. Do you remember how solemn we tried to be, you and I—you looking so dignified in your evening clothes and I just as dainty as I could be? And then suddenly you jumped up like a schoolboy and darted round the table to kiss me—and we kissed and laughed at ourselves, and kissed and laughed again, every time the servants went out of the room—a couple of happy children. And I loved you so much because you were so very clever and yet could be such a boy. And then we got solemn again as the bigness of it all came over us—real, real success at last! The paths of all the world seemed open to us, didn’t they, dear? And we drank to it, success and love! And then, quite close and looking into my eyes, you said the loveliest thing of all the lovely things you ever said to me—you said that your great success, the one success that really mattered to you, was that you had won my love, my real, real love that bound my soul to yours for ever. Oh, Harry, I would have died for you that night!”
She ceased and he was silent. The might-have-been came up before him with intolerable vividness. If one could but begin over again!
“And now,” she gently moved the hand that all this time had lain in his as they crouched close together over the fire, “and now here we are—all the years of hard work, so successful that we need not worry any more, behind us—nothing really important to do except to sit hand in hand and dream over the happy past, an old Darby and Joan who have lived their lives——”
He jumped to his feet.
“Christine! Christine!” he cried. “Let us make it true! Let us forget—forget all the bad dream—go on again together just as if what you said were true!”
She looked up at him, a strange and awful fear coming into her eyes, the face that had gained colour going ashen once more.
“Oh, Harry!” she said, in a tone of infinite reproach. “You’ve broken it! You’ve let go my hand!”
He ignored this infantile remark, went straight to his point in the brutally over-riding manner characteristic of him.
“Let us forget it, Christine, forget that you ever went away from me. I’ll never remind you of it. We won’t argue past responsibilities. We’ll start afresh. Christine, I’m a lonely old man—I want you. I want you to sit by the fire with me, to talk over, if you like, the might-have-beens that we threw away, I as much as you. I want you, anyway. I can’t bear loneliness any more—not now, after you have come back to me!”