"Don't let's talk about it any more!" he exclaimed. "There's no hurry about it now, after all."
"I would rather talk about it now, Philip. I don't—I don't at all understand what you mean. It is surely too late for us now to talk of marriage. The time remaining to us is too short to make it worth while."
Dering looked at her bewildered. Well as she spoke the language, she had remained very ignorant of England and of English law.
"I will try and explain to you," he said gently, "why Wingfield has made it quite clear to me that we shall have to go through some kind of a legal ceremony——"
"But there are so few months," she repeated, and he felt her trembling; "it is not as if you were likely to die before September; besides, if you were to do so, I should not care about the money."
For the first time a glimmer of what she meant, of what she was thinking, came into Dering's mind. He felt strongly moved and deeply touched. This, then, was why she had seemed so preoccupied, so unlike herself, of late.
"My darling, surely you do not imagine—that I am thinking ... of leaving you?"
"No," and for the first time Louise, as she uttered the word, looked up straight into Dering's face. "No, it was not of you that I was thinking—but of myself...."
"Let us sit down." Dering's voice was so changed, so uneager, so cold, that Louise, for the first time during their long partnership, felt as if she was with a stranger. "I want to thoroughly understand your point of view. Do you mean to say that when we first arranged matters you intended our—our marriage to be, in any case, only a temporary union?"