"If you are sure you wish it, write to me; I will always answer," she promised.
The poignancy was fading from their tones, as the anger against her had already faded from his heart. By degrees they talked more freely. She lost the bearing of a penitent before her judge; the weakness was all the man's, and it became her part to comfort. A slow thankfulness that she had been revealed to him began to tinge the greyness of his outlook; in him, and in her, a sense was dawning that they could never again be so utterly alone. When she went to the door with him not an hour had passed since he uttered his reproaches—and upon the threshold he took both her hands, and she said, "It's not 'good-bye.'"
On the morning when David's father followed a blonde in crape along the Brighton sea-front, the band was playing "La Fille de Madame Angot": when David held Bee's hands, and she said, "It's not good-bye," the present century was born. So far as the lives of David Lee and Hebe Sorrenford are lived, the story of their lives is told. Where it ends, another is beginning, and to some of us it must seem that the story of their friendship can end only when the man or woman dies. For the sympathy between these two who in spirit are one cannot die. That must last longer than their youth, and longer than their passions; I who have said what has been, believe it must last longer than the bodies that belie their souls. The pages of the story are blank, and we can do no more than guess how Time will write it. But after Hilda has become Vivian's wife, and when the music-room is silent, it cannot be rash to think that Bee will make her new home close to David's, and, since Nature calls to both, that through some village street the figures of the quaint companions will pass together every day—and pass together for so many days that at last the rustics cease to point at them. Alike in their ideals, in their feeling for beauty, alike even in their weaknesses, how can they drift apart? Far on in the unwritten story I see no separation but the night. I see them working together, hoping together—hopeful of an immortality for David's verse which perhaps it will not win—but both happier, both braver, each of them fortified by the other's love. When the name of Ownie is unspoken and she rests as "Lilian Augusta, Widow of Elisha Lee," I see them together still, and I think there is no knowledge in his comrade's heart that David does not share, excepting that his history has held such love as women give to men where children sing. If I am not wrong, one day he will know that too, but he will learn it only where there is a fuller charity, and a clearer light—in a World where a hue of the skin cannot ostracise, and a crook of the body cannot ban.