The clocks chimed the hour.
The street was filling up now. It was amusing to keep one’s eyes fixed on the blue blind, to see only an insubstantial noiseless world of human forms, cars and motor-bicycles, and be blind to the confusion of human and mechanical reality collecting outside. She would look only at the blue blind and see Jennifer’s reflection approaching before she saw herself. Her heart beat at the thought.
The room was filling up now. She tipped Jennifer’s chair against the table, for fear it should be taken; resumed her watching.
The space of glass cleared suddenly, was empty of all its shapes. She stared into the dim blank, waiting.
Then two shadows slid slowly in and paused. She watched them calmly, knew them without shock of alarm or surprise. Roddy bent his head to light his pipe. She knew the individual set of his feet, his long legs, the slender rather round-shouldered line of his back. She could almost discern his curious blunt profile, with its upward sweep of brow and eye. Tony was with him. His short figure had its hands in its pockets, its head raised towards Roddy, nodding slightly as if in earnest conversation. The noise in the street seemed to die away, and in the long hushed breathless space of a minute, Roddy lit his pipe, threw away the match, passed a hand over his hair in a familiar gesture, nodded and laughed, it seemed, looking down at Tony with that queer half-turn of the head; and then moved on, slipped with his companion towards the edge of the pane; and vanished.
He had come to see Tony then, just as if nothing had happened: as if he had not searched the sea for dead Martin; as if there were no reason not to go smoking, laughing, talking past the great court of Trinity.
Did he miss Martin? Had he put from him the memory of the tragedy with a characteristic shrug of the shoulders? Did he ever think with momentary discomfort of Judith?
Tony would have him all to himself now: no Martin, no Judith to interfere. He would be happy. They would come closer to each other; and never again would Judith be able to step in between them; for there was no more Judith. What were they talking of so earnestly—what, what? The old yearning to know, to understand, returned for a moment, and was followed by an utter blankness; and she knew that she had never known Roddy. He had never been for her. He had not once, for a single hour, become a part of real life. He had been a recurring dream, a figure seen always with abnormal clarity and complete distortion. The dream had obsessed her whole life with the problem of its significance, but now she was rid of it.
She had tried to make a reality out of the unreality: she had had the power to drag him once, reluctantly, from his path to meet her, to force a convergence where none should ever have been; and then disaster had resulted.
She seemed to wake up suddenly. Roddy, Roddy himself had been passing in the street outside. She could have seen him, and, instead, her eyes had not wavered from his reflection. A shadow laid on a screen and then wiped off again: he had never been much more; it was fittingly symbolic that she should have allowed him to pass thus for the last time from her eyes. For it was certain that she would never see him again.