A hungry intensity in his words escaped him unawares. Though he had spoken nothing of significance, the feeling that shook him reached her through the dusk with sinister force. She had felt the same thing before and had had a momentary impulse to run, to break free from it. She did not want to be subjected to another tyranny of her emotions.... Yet she had reasoned with herself. Here was a future that could in every sense be ideal, a man with whom she had everything in common and whom she knew she could trust....
A moment later he changed the subject and she was glad.
“By the way,” he said, “why not have your guest stay over, if he will? You know I’ve extra bedrooms, and there is no reason why he should not occupy one as long as he likes.”
It was a point that had worried and embarrassed her, and she was inexpressibly pleased that he had thought of it.
“You’re too good,” she said fervently, “and I would love to keep him.”
They chatted on over impersonal shallows until the time came for her to return to the cottage.
XXV
As she left him that night she wondered if her conscience troubled her. She was certainly encouraging Osprey. Standing in her own sitting room, she recalled vividly how, when he took her hand in good-night, she had felt the fierce stream that poured through him, and her very silence had given him permission to unburden himself. She was thankful for his restraint. Moreover her silence had been the result of pleasure, and not mere lack of words. How little she had known of anything quite so contained and yet so overpowering in Miles.... She could respond to that, she knew: she had only to yield a little and she could respond.
The thought of Osprey in this personal sense, of some one beside her husband in a personal sense, caused her to realize how much importance she had gone on attaching to Miles. How ridiculous and womanly of her! she reflected. Miles had taken his departure, and yet she had not until now seemed quite to believe in it. Perhaps even yet she did not believe in it. She had told Osprey that it was over; she kept repeating to herself that it was over. Everything pointed to it, Harlindew’s own unequivocal statement and her angry resentment of the manner of his desertion, particularly his letter. But in her real consciousness she had continued to expect his return ... during the whole of her talk with Osprey, Miles had been present as a reality—a definite bar—in her thought.
But now a new thing happened to her. She suddenly faced her whole life spread out before her as on a single canvas, or rather as a continuing panorama—and not just one small segment of it. Miles had not been her whole life; he had been but a part. He might have continued to be that part indefinitely and still not become her whole life. She had been magnifying him until she had lost sight of the rest, all that other strange web of adventure and catastrophe which had included her birth, her childhood, her love for Hal, her tragic discovery, her runaway, her struggle to help herself.... That would go on, no matter what happened, whether Miles returned or stayed away, and it would go on according to her own terms.