“Don’t worry over it now,” she said, gently. “There is time, you know. Why should people always want to decide things straight off?”
“You are right, Yvonne,” said Stephen. “Let us forget it for a little.”
“Your poor tea,” add Yvonne, with pathetic return to her old manner. “It will never be drunk. And do eat something, to please me.”
But it was a miserable meal. The tabooed subject filled the heart and thoughts of each. It was with an effort that they caught the drift of casual commonplaces uttered from time to time. Now and then, during the long spells of silence, Yvonne stole a swift feminine glance at his face. But his sombre expression seemed to tell her nothing of that which she longed to know. At last the farce ended. They rose from the table and went to their usual seats by the fireside. Joyce filled his pipe, and was fumbling in his pockets for a match, when Yvonne came forward with a spill and stood before him holding it until the pipe was alight. He tried to thank her, but the words would not come. The tender act of intimacy made his heart swell too painfully. Yvonne rang the bell and the elderly, slatternly maid-of-all-work, cleared away the tea-things. Sarah was one of the elements of the establishment that made Joyce hate his poverty. She drank, was unclean, was a perpetual soil in the atmosphere that Yvonne breathed. The sight of her was a new factor in the case against himself.
It was a terrible decision that he was called upon to make. On the one hand, wealth and ease and social happiness for Yvonne, despair and misery for himself. On the other, a selfish happiness for himself, and for Yvonne this squalor and ostracism. He knew that her sweet, gentle nature would accept the latter portion unmurmuringly. A voice rang in his ears the certainty that she would marry him, if he pleaded. To repress the temptation to cast all other thoughts but his yearning passion to the winds was indescribable torture.
“I wish I could sing to you,” she said, breaking a long silence. “I don’t know what to do now, when I feel things. Once I could sing them.”
“I should ask you to sing Gounod’s ‘Serenade,’” said Joyce.
“Oh, not that!” she cried quickly. “It was the last thing I ever sang to you, and it brought us bad luck.”
For a moment he put a lover’s passionate interpretation upon her words. His heart beat fast. He controlled the wild impulse that seized him, biting through the amber of his pipe with the nervous effort.
And then he realised that he must be alone to work out this stern problem, on whose solution depended the happiness of three human lives. He rose to his feet.