"I wouldn't let you go if I were your mother. Supposing I did spoil it all for you? How you'd hate me!"
"No, I shouldn't," he said.
"Why? Have you changed your mind, then—don't you want to go after all?"
"I shouldn't hate you, because I couldn't hate you whatever you did," he explained, haltingly. "Yes, of course I want to go, but—but I don't want to go yet."
They sat down, and there was a pause. In the pause, his consciousness of her presence grew queerly acute, almost painful.
"What's the scent you've got on?" he asked, unsteadily.
"Chypre," she said; "do you like it?"
She played with a ring she wore, and showed it to him. He touched the ring—and in a tumult of the spirit was holding her hand. They sat silent again. He knew that he ought to say something, that she was waiting for him to say something, that his long silence was ridiculous—and he could think of nothing to say. He was at once tremulous with joy and faint with fear—the fear that she would withdraw her hand before his effort had wrenched out words.
She withdrew it. He gazed before him blankly. When he was a man, and recalled that evening, he wondered whether the atmosphere had seemed so much a part of his emotions at the time as it did in looking back. He wondered whether, in his heartthrobs and his sickness, he had been acutely conscious of the black shrubs in the moonlight, of all the soft sounds and odours that stole up on the air. He thought not. Yet long after her features, which he tried to vitalise, were hazy to him, he could still see clearly the position that the two chairs had occupied, could have sketched the terrace almost with the accuracy of a plan, and felt the night air of Rouen in his throat.
Presently she said: