And Severn replied: "Much better for seeing you. Why the devil haven't you come here before?"
"I couldn't," he answered simply, and then he looked round the room and completed his salutations. To me he gave a cordial nod, and to June a curt quick smile which she returned instantly. He was one of us again.
I remember feeling an almost overmastering desire to make some trifling remark—something like—"Extraordinary how the years have flown, isn't it?"—anything, however stupid, that would in some way acknowledge the central fact of that eight years' interval. I don't know whether anybody else felt like that—quite probably not. Except for Severn, they all seemed stricken with a desire to say nothing at all.
Strange—that he should have met her again in that room, and with all of us looking on.... I had pictured so many places—some flower-decked railway-station in the Tirol, a Viennese boulevard at nighttime, some winding, hedge-bordered English lane, even Charing Cross Station—but never that room at the End House, with the port on the table and the twilight creeping over the cold lawns outside. It was disappointing, almost; it seemed to be making such poor use of a romantic opportunity....
The situation, however, was interesting, the more so as none of us knew what would happen.
For quite ten minutes nothing happened at all, and we just sat round the table making remarks as conventional and featureless as if the occasion had been the state visit of a grand-duke. Terry sat at the table with us, and though he declined a glass of port, he pulled a pipe out of his pocket and asked if he might smoke. We chaffed him a little about letting go his good resolutions, and he answered, rather cryptically: "You have to choose what you'll let go and what you'll hold on to."
For a time I allowed myself the faint hope that Helen, after all, mightn't carry out her threat, but her attitude soon dispelled it. "So you're working again?" she remarked, while he was filling his pipe. (And those were her first words to him.)
He replied that he was. He also gave a perfectly natural explanation of everything that had happened to him. "I worked a bit too hard in Vienna," he said, "and the result was a sort of break-down. But I think I've got over it now—at the price of a year's slacking." And he smiled.
She went on, with no more beating about the bush: "What do you think of Karelsky's latest discoveries?"
He looked up sharply, but without perturbation. "They're interesting," he said, puffing contemplatively at his pipe.