od news. I have just come from the Foreign Office, and they have
told me there that I am to have that job in India, and that the sooner I
am ready to start the better."

As he spoke he turned from her with a sudden, quick hurt in his heart.
It was, after all, only of great importance to himself. He knew she
would be kindly glad that he had got the post he wanted. Had she not
always urged him to some real work? Had she not pressed him again and
again during the last four years, consciously and unconsciously, to
bring out all his talents and to do a man's work in a man's way? So she
would be simply glad, and she would wave him "God speed," and would, no
doubt, pray for him at those innumerable services she attended, and
write to him long, gentle, feminine letters full of details about all
sorts of matters, good or indifferent, and she would ask about his
health and press him to take care of himself and tell him of any word
that was spoken kindly of him here in England. And she would somehow
manage to know, or think she knew, that he was doing great things in the
East. And so, no doubt, in the two years in which he was away there
would be no apparent break in this very dear intimacy. But what, in
reality, would he know of her inmost feelings, of her loneliness, of her
sufferings, of any repentance that might come to her, any softening
towards himself? He seemed to see all of the two years that were to come
in a flash as he stood silent on one side of the neglected tea-table,
and Rose stood silent, turning away from him on the other.

When he raised his eyes, he almost felt a surprise that the figure, a
little turned away from him, was not dressed in a plain, white frock,
and that the shadows and the flickering sunlight making its way through
the mulberry leaves were not still upon her; for that was how, through
life and in eternity, Rose would be present in the mind of her lover.

Time had gone; it seemed now as nothing. Whatever changes had come
between, he felt as if he saw in the averted face that same expression
of sorrowful denial and gentle resistance that had baffled him now for
over twelve years. It was still that his soul asked something of this
other purer, gentler, more unworldly, more loving soul, which she, with
all her beneficence would not give him. He did no think of the
impracticability of any question of marriage; he did not think in any
definite sense of their relations as man and woman. At other times