“No, no. I mean the yard dog when you were a little boy.” He laughed and snapped the cigarette case to.
“Was he? Do you know I had forgotten that. It seems such ages ago. I cannot believe that it is only six years. After I had recognized you to-day—I had to take such a leap—I had to take a leap over my whole life to get back to that time. I was such a kid then.” He drummed on the table. “I’ve often thought how I must have bored you. And now I understand so perfectly why you wrote to me as you did—although at the time that letter nearly finished my life. I found it again the other day, and I couldn’t help laughing as I read it. It was so clever—such a true picture of me.” He glanced up. “You’re not going?”
She had buttoned her collar again and drawn down her veil.
“Yes, I am afraid I must,” she said, and managed a smile. Now she knew that he had been mocking.
“Ah, no, please,” he pleaded. “Don’t go just for a moment,” and he caught up one of her gloves from the table and clutched at it as if that would hold her. “I see so few people to talk to nowadays, that I have turned into a sort of barbarian,” he said. “Have I said something to hurt you?”
“Not a bit,” she lied. But as she watched him draw her glove through his fingers, gently, gently, her anger really did die down, and besides, at the moment he looked more like himself of six years ago. . . .
“What I really wanted then,” he said softly, “was to be a sort of carpet—to make myself into a sort of carpet for you to walk on so that you need not be hurt by the sharp stones and the mud that you hated so. It was nothing more positive than that—nothing more selfish. Only I did desire, eventually, to turn into a magic carpet and carry you away to all those lands you longed to see.”
As he spoke she lifted her head as though she drank something; the strange beast in her bosom began to purr. . . .
“I felt that you were more lonely than anybody else in the world,” he went on, “and yet, perhaps, that you were the only person in the world who was really, truly alive. Born out of your time,” he murmured, stroking the glove, “fated.”
Ah, God! What had she done! How had she dared to throw away her happiness like this. This was the only man who had ever understood her. Was it too late? Could it be too late? She was that glove that he held in his fingers. . . .