'We can just hear the music,' she whispered.
Her heart was beating hard and fast: they had been as under a spell, so close were they to one another, but now she was bitterly conscious of having lost him. She knew that he had slipped from the fairyland of Aphros back to the world of principles, of morals both conventional and essential. In fairyland, whither she had enticed him, all things were feasible, permissible, even imperative. He had accompanied her, she thought, very willingly, and they had strayed together down enchanted paths, abstaining, it is true, from adventuring into the perilous woods that surrounded them, but hand in hand, nevertheless, their departure from the path potential at any rate, if not imminent. They had been alone; she had been so happy, so triumphant. Now he had fled her, back to another world inhabited by all the enemies she would have had him forget: her cruelties, her vanities—her vanities! he could never reconcile her vanities and her splendour; he was incapable of seeing them both at the same time; the one excluded the other, turn and turn about, in his young eyes; her deceptions, her evasions of the truth, the men she had misled, the man, above all, that she had killed and whose death she had accepted with comparative indifference. These things rose in a bristling phalanx against her, and she faced them, small, afraid, and at a loss. For she was bound to admit their existence, and the very vivid, the very crushing, reality of their existence, all-important to her, in Julian's eyes; although she herself might be too completely devoid of moral sense, in the ordinary acceptance of the word, to admit any justification for his indignation. She knew with sorrow that they would remain for ever as a threat in the background, and that she would be fortunate indeed if in that background she could succeed in keeping them more or less permanently. Her imagination sighed for a potion of forgetfulness. Failing that, never for an instant must she neglect her rôle of Calypso. She knew that on the slightest impulse to anger on Julian's part—and his impulses to anger were, alas, both violent and frequent—all those enemies in their phalanx would instantly rise and range themselves on his side against her. Coaxed into abeyance, they would revive with fatal ease.
She knew him well in his present mood of gloom. She was afraid, and a desperate anxiety to regain him possessed her. Argument, she divined, would be futile. She whispered his name.
He turned on her a face of granite.
'Why have you changed?' she said helplessly. 'I was so happy, and you are making me so miserable.'
'I have no pity for you,' he said, 'you are too pitiless yourself to deserve any.'
'You break my heart when you speak to me like that.'
'I should like to break it,' he replied, unmoved.
She did not answer, but presently he heard her sobbing. Full of suspicion, he put out his hand and felt the tears running between her fingers.
'I have made you cry,' he said.