"Why?"
"It is so difficult to repeat a great, an intense happiness, I think. But we will, we are repeating it, aren't we?"
"Yes."
"When I got to the station to-day, and—and you weren't there, I had a dreadful foreboding. It was foolish. The explanation of your not being there was so simple. Of course I might have guessed it."
"Of course."
"But in the first moment I felt as if you weren't there because I had lost you forever, because you had been taken away from me forever. It was such an intense feeling that it frightened me—it frightened me horribly. Put your arm round me, Maurice. Let me feel what an idiot I have been!"
He obeyed her and put his arm round her, and he felt as if his arm must tell her what she had not learned from his lips. And she thought that now he must know the truth she had not told him.
"Don't think of dreadful things," he said.
"I won't any more. I don't think I could with you. To me you always mean the sun, light, and life, and all that is brave and beautiful!"
He took his arm away from her.