“Who are you? What do you want?”
The man moved into the light.
“Jaspar! You? What on earth——”
“I want to talk.”
“Talk? Do you know what time it is?”
“Time—there's no such thing. You might give me a kiss after two years. I've been drinking, but I'm not drunk.”
Mrs. Bellew did not kiss him, neither did she draw back her face. No trace of alarm showed in her ice-grey eyes. She said: “If I let you in, will you promise to say what you want to say quickly, and go away?”
The little brown devils danced in Bellew's face. He nodded. They stood by the hearth in the sitting-room, and on the lips of both came and went a peculiar smile.
It was difficult to contemplate too seriously a person with whom one had lived for years, with whom one had experienced in common the range of human passion, intimacy, and estrangement, who knew all those little daily things that men and women living together know of each other, and with whom in the end, without hatred, but because of one's nature, one had ceased to live. There was nothing for either of them to find out, and with a little smile, like the smile of knowledge itself, Jaspar Bellew and Helen his wife looked at each other.
“Well,” she said again; “what have you come for?”