“The air here needs clearing,” Sabine was saying. “It needs a thunderstorm, and it can be cleared only by acting.... This affair of Jean and Sybil will help. We are all caught up in a tangle of thoughts and ideas ... which don’t matter.... You can do it, Olivia. You can clear the air once and for all.”
Then for the first time Olivia thought she saw what lay behind all this intriguing of Sabine; for a moment she fancied that she saw what it was Sabine wanted more passionately than anything else in the world.
Aloud she said it, “I could clear the air, but it would also be the destruction of everything.”
Sabine looked at her directly. “Well?... and would you be sorry? Would you count it a loss? Would it make any difference?”
Impulsively she touched Sabine’s hand. “Sabine,” she said, without looking at her, “I’m fond of you. You know that. Please don’t talk any more about this ... please, because I want to go on being fond of you ... and I can’t otherwise. It’s our affair, mine and Michael’s ... and I’m going to settle it, to-night perhaps, as soon as I can have a talk with him.... I can’t go on any longer.”
Taking up the yellow parasol, Sabine asked, “Do you expect me for dinner to-night?”
“Of course, more than ever to-night.... I’m sorry you’ve decided to go so soon.... It’ll be dreary without you or Sybil.”
“You can go, too,” said Sabine quickly. “There is a way. He’d give up everything for you ... everything. I know that.” Suddenly she gave Olivia a sharp look. “You’re thirty-eight, aren’t you?”
“Day after to-morrow I shall be forty!”
Sabine was tracing the design of roses on Horace Pentland’s Savonnerie carpet with the tip of her parasol. “Gather them while you may,” she said and went out into the blazing heat to cross the meadows to Brook Cottage.