"She made me know that there can be no doubt in a great love-story," he added. "She made me know that there is no such thing as a triangle; that a man or a woman in doubt between two, loves neither as the world shall presently know love. She made me know that love cannot be altogether on one side—that mine could not hold because she had not the same for me. The mystery of its falling from me in the Great Drift revealed that. She opened my heart for the woman I was to find. I did not believe when she told me that, but I have come to believe it. After I saw her behind the low shoulders of Nifton Bend—I knew that my heart's desire was still a-field, and that all she had said was truth. The power of this truth was opened to me the night I rode into this little court—"
Her eyes were turned out to the sunlight.
"It seemed that I had come home that moment," he added. "I did not want to leave you that night. I never did a harder thing than to call for the camels the next morning. And when you put your hand on the leather at my foot—it was not until then that I knew what our meeting meant to you. Realising that—the transaction was finished, so far as I was concerned."
"I never thought I would feel like this," she repeated.
"It was like a review of all the hells," he said, meaning the Drift. "I look at the years before that as a kind of semi-sleep. I moved about only partly conscious—studying, watching, laughing at things, fancying I was somebody, thinking I had done something when I got into the pulse of China. The fact is, the Romney of those days wasn't ready to come into the court of this little Consulate—"
Her face was still turned away. Very quickly the flaw appeared in his last sentences. He was making very light of a wastrel period—a period without will and organised manhood of any kind.
"Don't think I fail to see the other side," he said hastily. "Something of quiet and power has seemed to come out of it, but it was abandonment. It was weak. A better man would not have thought of letting go as I did. Even if he didn't want to live he would have put himself out of the way in a clean-cut abrupt fashion—"
She shook her head quickly, as if pained at some picture in her mind.
"A real man would have done neither," he added. "He would have taken his medicine and not thought of death. There is always a yellow streak in letting go.... I'm sorry to bring you such a story. It has no virtue save that of being true. Also it is back—finished."
Her silence was destroying him. The panorama of his abandonment rushed past in a kind of red dark. His voice had a whimper, for his own ears, as he said: