‘This is only torment,’ she said at last—‘go now.’
An overpowering longing rushed through her to break the web that circumstances had woven between them, to take what she had renounced, to bid him stay, to trust to chance that time would make all well. How could she let him go when it lay in her hands to stave off the moment that was coming? She had reached the turning-point, the last piece of her road at which she could touch hands with happiness.
He was holding her fast.
‘I am going,’ he said, in a voice like the voice of a stranger—someone a long way off.
She could not speak. There were a thousand things which, when he was gone, she knew that she must blame herself for not saying, but they would not stay with her till her lips could frame them.
‘Perhaps we shall sometimes see each other,’ he whispered, ‘but God knows if I could bear it.’
They clung together in a maze of kisses and incoherent words. When they separated, she stood trembling in the middle of the room. He looked back at her from the threshold, and turned again.
‘Gilbert! Gilbert!’ she cried, throwing her arms round his neck.
Then they tore themselves apart, and the door closed between them and upon everything that each had come to value in life.
When the sound of his horse’s feet had died, she stayed on where he had left her. One who is gone is never quite gone while we retain the fresh impression of his presence. She knew that, and she was loth to leave a place which seemed still to hold his personality. She sat on, unconscious of time, until a servant came into shut the windows, and then she went downstairs and stood outside the front-door upon the flags. The blackbird was still on the grass whistling, but at the sudden appearance of her figure in the doorway, he flew, shrieking in rich gutturals, into cover.