"What's enough?"
"Enough said. We've talked enough of this."
"Turning sulky now. Miss Neville will be kind to you if you go back."
"Molly, there's a good child, don't tease my temper any more. We'll talk of what you like, but forget this one thing. Why should I say a word in her defence? How does she need it, who is so far from our reach that you can't understand her, and I haven't the skill to price what I have lost? If you want to learn what love is go to her with your lesson books. All I have done has been of no account. You and I, child, could kiss on and on for ever, and with us all the crying lovers who count love a mere spending of kisses; and all those kisses kissed would fly up in the scales when what she had to bring was laid in the other balance."
He fell into a sudden black mood—an evil habit he had learned lately. He remembered he sat upon the fallen tree, and at his feet in the coarse grasses lay the loveliest woman he would ever look upon. The night was shrill with tiny voices, and endless lightnings opened and closed the skies, but for the time these things did not affect him.
It seemed he was coming to the bottom of the cup whose rim his lips had held for so long. The last drops were against his mouth and the sediment was on his tongue. And, lo! it appeared as if some virtue in the sediment quickened the eyesight of the spirit, for at last he could point a finger and say there was substance and there shadow. Lo! what he had once thought substance was now revealed as shadow, and what he had believed shadow was assuredly substance.
He woke up when the child laid a hand in his own. "Say something, Jim, or I am going home." He kissed her very gently and started to talk to her. But from that hour his passion began to die.