For a moment neither spoke.
Then he said:
“It is as if one of us were dying, Marion, though that I think would be easy to bear compared with this. ‘The bitterness of death’ they talk of! All, they little know! Good-bye, my own true darling. My one love, my life’s love—goodbye.” And as he said the words he stooped and kissed her—gently, but long and fervently, on the forehead.
Poor Ralph! It was the first time.
Was it wrong of her to allow it? Those who think so may judge her, and I for one shall not argue it with them.
She stood with bent head, motionless, staring at the ground, but seeing nothing. Then she looked up hastily, with eyes for the first time blinded with burning, slow-coming tears. Tears that bring no relief, wrung from the sore agony of a bleeding heart.
But he was gone!
And so “the old, old story” was over for ever for these two; as for how many others, whose suffering is never suspected!
Ralph walked back slowly to the inn, along the very garden path which half-an-hour before, half a lifetime it seemed to him, he had paced so light-heartedly. The same little stiff box-edging he had noticed before, the same scent from the roses and honeysuckle, the same sun and sky and air. Then, he remembered he had said to himself, it was all sweet and bright and fair. Could he have said so? Was the change in himself only? “Could it indeed be,” he asked, as we all do at these awful times, beating our poor bruised wings against the bars of the inexorable “it is”—“could it be that nature should remain thus unmoved and indifferent when human beings were riven in agony?”
And a feeling of intensest disgust, amounting almost to rage, seized him at the sight of the hateful, heartless, beautiful world! But when he found this mood coming over him he checked it violently.