“It’s no use hiding our heads in the sand,” she said, and then she added in cold and precise words:
“You’re love with me and I’m in love with you. We’re drifting, drifting. But I’m not the woman to drift. I mean to do what’s right, and I mean to make you. There’s no more to be said.”
Robert Grimshaw walked to the farthest end of the tall room. He remained for a long time with his face to the corner. He attempted no denial. He could not deny, and once again he seemed older. His voice was even a little husky when, looking at her feet, he said:
“I can’t think what’s to be done,” and, in a very low voice, he added, “unless ...” She looked at him with her lips parted, and he uttered the one word: “Katya!” Her hand went up over her heart.
And he remembered how she had said that her mother always looked most characteristic when she sat, with her hand over her heart, erect, listening for the storms in the distance. And suddenly her voice appeared to be one issuing from a figure of stone:
“Yes, that is it! She was indicated from the first; we ought to have asked her from the first. That came into my head this afternoon.”
“We couldn’t have done better than we have,” he said. “We didn’t know how. We haven’t been letting time slip.”
She nodded her head slowly.
“We have been letting time slip. I knew it when I saw these two over Dudley this afternoon. I lost suddenly all faith in Sir William. It went out of me like water out of a glass, and I saw at once that we had been letting time slip.”
Grimshaw said: “Oh!”