His face suddenly lost its hard look, a kinder light came into the keen eyes. For a brief moment he rested a hand on the chair-back beside hers, then, recollecting, as suddenly removed it.
“When I go out of this room to-night,” he said, “I go out of your life finally. If you send for me again, I shall not obey the summons. God knows, I have injured you enough... The least that I can do is to help you to forget. This raking among the ashes is unprofitable. You can’t step down from your pedestal. I can’t stand with you on the heights. We look at life from different points of view, at different elevations. You see things from a height that obscures your perspective; I look upon life from a lower level, and behold its naked realities. What seems to me natural, you would regard as gross. It is one of the essential differences—only exaggerated—between man and woman. I can’t see the use in reviving through these unsatisfactory meetings all the stresses we lived through in the past... I’ll keep out of Cape Town as much as possible, and when my job here is ended I’ll leave the country.”
“There is no need for that,” she replied in so low a voice that he only just heard what she said. “I came out because I knew you were out here. I wanted to see you. Now that I have seen you I shall go Home.”
She looked at him quite calmly and held out her hand.
“Good-bye,” she said, that was all.
He felt grateful to her after he had left that she had spared him a more emotional scene. Could he have looked back into the room when he was speeding towards Cape Town he would have known that the emotion had merely been held in check.
Chapter Twenty Four.
Lawless reached Kraaifontein to find that there was neither word from nor sign of Tottie. No person answering Tottie’s description had been seen in the neighbourhood recently.