or in mental quality,
explaining with a false lucidity, welcoming and encouraging the feeblest
response, when possible moulding and directing, are times when I did
indeed, as the old phrase goes, worship the ground she trod on. I was
equally honest and unconscious of inconsistency at each extreme. But in
neither phase could I find it easy to make love to Margaret. For in the
first I did not want to, though I talked abundantly to her of marriage
and so forth, and was a little puzzled at myself for not going on to
some personal application, and in the second she seemed inaccessible, I
felt I must make confessions and put things before her that would be the
grossest outrage upon the noble purity I attributed to her.

9

I went to Margaret at last to ask her to marry me, wrought up to the
mood of one who stakes his life on a cast. Separated from her, and with
the resonance of an evening of angry recriminations with Mrs. Larrimer
echoing in my mind, I discovered myself to be quite passionately in
love with Margaret. Last shreds of doubt vanished. It has always been a
feature of our relationship that Margaret absent means more to me than
Margaret present; her memory distils from its dross and purifies in
me. All my criticisms and qualifications of her vanished into some dark
corner of my mind. She was the lady of my salvation; I must win my way
to her or perish.

I went to her at last, for all that I knew she loved me, in passionate
self-abasement, white and a-tremble. She was staying with the Rockleys
at Woking, for Shena Rockley had been at Bennett Hall with her and they
had resumed a close intimacy; and I went down to her on an impulse,
unheralded. I was kept waiting for some minutes, I remember, in a little
room upon which a conservatory opened, a conservatory full of pots
of large mauve-edged, white cyclamens in flower. And there was a big
lacquer cabinet, a Chinese thing, I suppose, of black and gold against
the red-toned wall. To this day the thought of Margaret is inseparably
bound up with the sight of a cyclamen's back-turned petals.

She came in, looking pale and drooping rather more than usual. I
suddenly realised that Altiora's hint of a disappointment leading to
positive illness was something more than a vindictive comment. She
closed the door and came across to me and took and dropped my hand and
stood still. "What is it you want with me?" she asked.

The speech I had been turning over and over in my