“Isn't she up in the women's gallery to hear him?”
“No. Unless it's by accident.”
“She's there,” she said.
“Well, by accident it happens. Not too many accidents, Isabel. Never any more adventures for us, dear, now. No!... They play the game, you know. They've begun late, but now they've got to. You see it's not so very hard for them since you and I, my dear, are here always, always faithfully here on this warm cliff of love accomplished, watching and helping them under high heaven. It isn't so VERY hard. Rather good in some ways. Some people HAVE to be broken a little. Can you see Altiora down there, by any chance?”
“She's too little to be seen,” she said.
“Can you see the sins they once committed?”
“I can only see you here beside me, dear—for ever. For all my life, dear, till I die. Was that—the sin?”...
I took her to the station, and after she had gone I was to drive to Dover, and cross to Calais by the night boat. I couldn't, I felt, return to London. We walked over the crest and down to the little station of Martin Mill side by side, talking at first in broken fragments, for the most part of unimportant things.
“None of this,” she said abruptly, “seems in the slightest degree real to me. I've got no sense of things ending.”
“We're parting,” I said.