“My dear,” said John, “I've got to get up to town this morning.”
“You won't do that,” said Stella. “Look at the clock.”
It was a quarter to one. He had spent the whole morning with her, and the hours had flown by like minutes.
“Why did n't you tell me that I ought to be catching my train?”
She regarded him in demure mischief.
“I had no object in making you catch your train.”
And then Her Serene High-and-Mightiness, the nurse (who had been called in for Stella when first she was put to bed in the sea-chamber, and, falling under her spell, had stayed on until she had grown as much involved in the web of her life as Sir Oliver and Lady Julia and Constable and Herold and Risca), came into the room and decreed the end of the morning interview.
Risca went down-stairs, his purpose unaccomplished. He walked about the garden and argued with himself. Now, when a man argues with himself, he, being only the extraneous eidolon of himself, invariably gets the worst of the argument, and this makes him angry. John was angry; to such a point that, coming across Sir Oliver, who had just returned from an inexplicably disastrous game of golf and began to pour a story of bunkered gloom into his ear, he gnashed his teeth and tore his hair and told Sir Oliver to go to the devil with his lugubrious and rotten game, and dashed away to the solitude of the beach until the luncheon-bell summoned him back.
“I'm going by the 3:50,” said he at the luncheon-table.
At three o'clock Stella was free to see him again. He went up to her room distinctly determined to shut his heart against folly. The sun had crept round toward the west and flooded the head and shoulders of Stellamaris and the dainty bedspread with pale gold, just as it flooded the now still and smiling sea. Again paralysis fell upon John. The words he was to speak were to him, as well as to her, the words of doom, and he could not utter them. They talked of vain, childish things. Then Stellamaris's clock chimed the three-quarters. There are some chimes that are brutal, others ironic; but Stellamaris's chimes (the clock was a gift from John himself) were soft, and pealed a soothing mystery, like a bell swung in a deep sea-cave.