“You wrote to me that you were unchanged, Nevil.”
“I am.”
“So, then, I came.”
His rejoinder was the dumb one, commonly eloquent and satisfactory.
Renée shut her eyes with a painful rigour of endurance. She opened them to look at him steadily.
The desperate act of her flight demanded immediate recognition from him in simple language and a practical seconding of it. There was the test.
“I cannot stay in this house, Nevil; take me away.”
She named her hotel in her French English, and the sound of it penetrated him with remorseful pity. It was for him, and of his doing, that she was in an alien land and an outcast!
“This house is wretched for you,” said he: “and you must be hungry. Let me...”
“I cannot eat. I will ask you”: she paused, drawing on her energies, and keeping down the throbs of her heart: “this: do you love me?”