“I wonder,” said Advena, “where it goes?”
“Into the void behind time?” he suggested, smiling straight at her.
“Into the texture of the future,” she answered, smiling back.
“We might bring it to bear very intelligently on the future, at any rate,” he returned. “The world is wrapped in destiny, and but revolves to roll it out.”
“I don’t remember that,” she said curiously.
“No you couldn’t,” he laughed outright. “I haven’t thought it good enough to publish.”
“And it isn’t the sort of thing,” she ventured gaily, “you could put in a sermon.”
“No, it isn’t.” They came to a corner of the street which led to Mr Finlay’s boarding-house. It stretched narrowly to the north and there was a good deal more snow on each side of it. They lingered together for a moment talking, seizing the new joy in it which was simply the joy of his sudden liberation with her consciously pushing away the moment of parting; and Finlay’s eyes rested once again on the evening sky beyond the river.
“I believe you are right and I am a moralizer,” he said. “There IS pain over there. One thinks a sunset beautiful and impressive, but one doesn’t look at it long.”
Then they separated, and he took the road to the north, which was still snowbound, while she went on into the chilly yellow west, with the odd sweet illusion that a summer day was dawning.