tion from herself.

"But--what you are saying is horrible," I said. "I don't believe you know
how horrible it is."

So far was she from understanding _me_ that she answered: "Yes, it is
horrible. But it was only a little bit of me. And it's all over. Burned
away, Wally. I burned it when I burned my boats. Don't think of me as if
I were really like that."

You see? We had been talking about different things. My mind had been
fastened on an external incident, ugly in itself, ugly in its apparent
purpose, ugly in its consequences, ugly every way you looked at it. Hers
had been concentrated on the event that had happened in her soul, an
event to her altogether beautiful--the destruction of the cowardice that
would have brought her back, that shrank from taking the risk that her
soul dared.

This, she seemed to say, is how I deal with cowardice.

That she had compromised herself by dealing with it in this way had
simply never occurred to her. It couldn't. She didn't know and wouldn't
have believed it possible that people did these things.

What had frightened her, she said, was Jimmy's saying that about keeping
the other places till they could see them together. He meant, you see,
till they were married. It brought it so home to her. And it brought home
to her what it meant to him. Because he couldn't afford to marry yet for
ages.

If she'd gone back, she said, it would have been so cruel to him. And it
would have been so cruel to herself, too.

Then she told me what they had done together. Heavens! How she must have
trusted him. She joined him here in Bruges. And they'd gone to Antwerp,
then to Ghent, then back to Bruges. (I had followed close on their
traces, a day behind them at each city.)

And it had all been so beautiful. She simply couldn't tell me how
beautiful it had been. It was as if she had never seen anything properly
before.

Jimmy had made her see things. "I can understand," she said, "what he
meant when he said that the beauty of this place hurt him. It hurts
_me_."

I reminded her that Jimmy had said it hurt him because she wasn't there.

She looked up and smiled. "He isn't here _now_, Furny."

I took her to Ostend first thing in the morning and saw her on to the
boat. I advised her to remove the foreign labels from her trunk at Dover,
and to contrive so that she shouldn't be seen arriving by the up platform
at Canterbury.

"Oh," she said. "You have to take _some_ risk!"

We were on the g