“Of course we shall meet again,” she said to herself. “It’s all nonsense about forgetting. He can’t forget if he really cares. And we shall be older then, and more tolerant, and get into one another’s ways better.” A vision crossed her mind of herself and Wylie placed farther apart by the passage of years, both more fixed in their own ways and opinions, each finding it more difficult to understand the other, but she brushed it aside. “I have a right to live my own life, just as he has a right to try and get me to live his, if he can. I wonder whether he could have made me marry him, as he said? It would be hard to refuse, I know, if he had looked at me. I—I almost wish he had tried. And why didn’t he tell me about the Soudan until just at the end?”
She wondered in vain, but Wylie vouchsafed enlightenment later to Eirene, who felt that her own engagement supplied a vantage-ground from which to stretch out helping hands to those who were less fortunate in their love affairs. With the gracious little air of condescension which she had now laid aside in Maurice’s case, she took Wylie to task.
“The Soudan is just what Zoe would love,” she said. “You should have told her about it sooner—quite at the beginning. Why didn’t you?”
“Because I didn’t want her to marry me merely as a purveyor of adventures.”
“You are a very rude man,” said Eirene, with dignity.
“Sorry,” said Wylie. “It’s not the first time you’ve had that against me, is it?”
“But it makes me unhappy that you should manage things so badly, for you are the very person for Zoe.”
“You mustn’t flatter my self-conceit by agreeing with me. She doesn’t think so, you see.”
“Oh, but she will, some day. Don’t think me meddling, prying”—she blushed—“but you won’t suddenly marry some one else in despair, will you?”
“There won’t be much chance of marrying any one where I shall be,” he said, looking down at her kindly, “so I can reassure your mind by saying that it’s in my work I hope to forget all this.”