She snatched her hand away.
"People talking? Who?...But as though that mattered."
"It does matter. It has gone far--much farther than I thought."
She looked at him then, quickly, and turned her face away again.
"Who's talking? And what are they saying?"
"They are saying----" He broke off. What were they saying? Until the arrival of that horrible letter he had not realised that they were saying anything at all.
"Don't think for a single moment, Amy, that I pay the slightest attention to any of their talk. I would not have bothered you with any of this had it not been for something else--of which I'll speak in a moment. If everything is right between us--between you and me--then it doesn't matter if the whole world talks until it's blue in the face."
"Leave it alone, then," she said. "Let them talk."
Her indifference stung him. She didn't care, then, whether things were right between himself and her or no? It was the same to her. She cared so little for him.... That sudden realisation struck him so sharply that it was as though some one had hit him in the back. For so many years he had taken it for granted...taken something for granted that was not to be so taken. Very dimly some one was approaching him--that dark, misty, gigantic figure--blotting out the light from the windows. That figure was becoming day by day more closely his companion.
Looking at her now more intently, and with a new urgency, he said: