here were noises of opening doors, of voices
outside.

"I believe you care enough," I said "to give it all up for me. I believe
you do, and I want you." I continued to pace up and down. The noises of
returning day grew loud; frightfully loud. It was as if I must hasten,
must get said what I had to say, as if I must raise my voice to make it
heard amid the clamour of a world awakening to life.

"I believe you do ... I believe you do...." I said again and again, "and
I want you." My voice rose higher and higher. She stood motionless, an
inscrutable white figure, like some silent Greek statue, a harmony of
falling folds of heavy drapery perfectly motionless.

"I want you," I said--"I want you, I want you, I want you." It was
unbearable to myself.

"Oh, be quiet," she said at last. "Be quiet! If you had wanted me I have
been here. It is too late. All these days; all these--"

"But ..." I said.

From without someone opened the great shutters of the windows, and the
light from the outside world burst in upon us.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

We parted in London next day, I hardly know where. She seemed so part of
my being, was for me so little more than an intellectual force, so
little of a physical personality, that I cannot remember where my eyes
lost sight of her.

I had desolately made the crossing from country to country, had convoyed
my aunt to her big house in one of the gloomy squares in a certain
district, and then we had parted. Even afterward it was as if she were
still beside me, as if I had only to look round to find her eyes upon
me. She remained the propelling force, I a boat thrust out upon a
mill-pond, moving more and more slowly. I had been for so long in the
shadow of that great house, shut in among the gloom, that all this
light, this blazing world--it was a June day in London--seemed
impossible, and hateful. Over there, there had been nothing but very
slow, fading minutes; now there was a past, a future. It was as if I
stood between them in a cleft of unscalable rocks.

I went about mechanically, made arrangements for my housing, moved in
and out of rooms in the enormous mausoleum of a club that was all the
home I had, in a sort of stupor. Suddenly I remembered that I had been
thinking of something; that she had been talking of Churchill. I had had
a letter from him on the morning of the day before. When I read it,
Churchill and his "_Cromwell_" had risen in my mind like preposterous
phantoms; th