"Why not? What do you think I've come for?"
"I don't know in the least. What have you come for?"
She looked at him appealingly. He saw, with keen and instant relish, that she had already noticed something of hostility in his attitude towards her. The torture had begun. For the first time, she was subject to his power and not he to hers.
"I've come for a few minutes' conversation," she answered, quietly. "And the next train back is at 3:18."
"You mean to travel by that?"
"Yes."
"Then we needn't stay in the station till then, need we? Let's walk somewhere. We've two whole hours—time enough to get right out of the town and back again. I hate conversations in railway-stations."
But his chief reason was a desire to secure the right scenic background for his torture of her.
"All right," she answered, and looked at him again appealingly. The tears almost welled into his own eyes because of the deep sadness that was in hers. How quick she was to feel his harshness!—he thought. How marvellously sensitive was that little soul of hers to the subtlest gradations of his own mood! What fiendish torture he could put her to, by no more, might be, than the merest upraising of an eyebrow, the faintest change of the voice, the slightest tightening of the lips! She was of mercury, like himself; responsive to every touch of the emotional atmosphere. And was not that the reason why she understood him with such wonderful instinctive intimacy,—was not that the reason why the two of them, out of the whole world, would have sought each other like twin magnets?
He led her, in silence, through the litter of mean streets near the station, and thence, beyond the edge of the town, towards the meadows that sloped to the sea. So far it had been a perfect day, but now the sun was half-quenching itself in a fringe of mist that lay along the horizon; and with the change there came a sudden pink light that lit both their faces and shone behind them on the tawdry newness of the town, giving it for once a touch of pitiful loveliness. He took her into a rolling meadow that tapered down into a coppice, and as they reached the trees the last shaft of sunlight died from the sky. Then they plunged into the grey depths, with all the freshly-budded leaves brushing against their faces, and the very earth, so it seemed, murmuring at their approach. Already there was the hint of rain in the air.