“Please do.”
She clutched at the arm of her chair, grasping it firmly. There were so many things she wanted to say to this man, and time was so short; at any moment they might be interrupted... The precious moments were slipping away... And he gave her so little help. His manner was so curt as to be almost repellent.
“Do you think it necessary,” she asked, “that when we meet it should be as strangers—almost enemies?”
“Aren’t we that?” he said. “I understood that I represented both to you.”
She was silent because his last words had recalled a hard thing she had once in the years gone by written to him in an hour of wounded anger: “I do not know you... I think I have never known you. You are a stranger to me, and, I see now, my greatest enemy...”
“It is for you,” he added, filling in the pause, “to determine our future relations... I am a little surprised that you should meet me as you have done. And I’m not sure that it wouldn’t have been happier for both if you had acted differently... The fires of yesterday are ashes on the hearth of to-day... I don’t know how it is with you, but the sight of greying embers chills me.”
She sat leaning forward, her eyes fixed unseeingly straight before her as though they sought to pierce the blackness that lay beyond the stoep. Some of the pain and bitterness that was in her heart shone through them, so that they looked tortured in the soft glow of the artificial lights. She gripped the arm of her chair more tightly, and, still staring into the darkness, said tonelessly:
“With women it is not usual to leave ashes lying on the hearth.”
“You sweep them up and throw them away,” he answered. “It is wiser so... One forgets.”
“Some do,” she rejoined slowly. “And others—collect their ashes carefully and kindle them anew.”