“I tell you,” he asseverated insistently, “if the British Government abandons my railway all our plans ...”
“Oh, the Government won’t abandon it,” she said, with a little emphasis on the verb. He stepped back out of range of the wheels, and we turned in and left him standing there.
In the great room which was usually given up to the political plotters stood a table covered with eatables and lit by a pair of candles in tall silver sticks. I was conscious of a raging hunger and of a fierce excitement that made the thought of sleep part of a past of phantoms. I began to eat unconsciously, pacing up and down the while. She was standing beside the table in the glow of the transparent light. Pallid blue lines showed in the long windows. It was very cold and hideously late; away in those endless small hours when the pulse drags, when the clock-beat drags, when time is effaced.
“You see?” she said suddenly.
“Oh, I see,” I answered—“and ... and now?”
“Now we are almost done with each other,” she answered.
I felt a sudden mental falling away. I had never looked at things in that way, had never really looked things in the face. I had grown so used to the idea that she was to parcel out the remainder of my life, had grown so used to the feeling that I was the integral portion of her life ... “But I—” I said, “What is to become of me?”
She stood looking down at the ground ... for a long time. At last she said in a low monotone:
“Oh, you must try to forget.”