to answer:

"You would go," she said. "And so should I. . . ."

She stepped onto the gangway.

Half an hour later, the _Queen Mary_ left Newhaven harbour. At that
instant, Simon, who was always so completely his own master and who,
even in the most feverish moments of enthusiasm, claimed the power of
controlling his emotions, felt his legs trembling beneath him, while
his eyes grew moist with tears. The test of happiness was too much for
him.

Simon had never been in love before. Love was an event which he
awaited at his leisure; and he did not think it essential to prepare
for its coming by seeking it in adventures which might well exhaust
his ardour:

"Love," he used to say, "should blend with life, should form a part of
life and not be added to it. Love is not an aim in itself: it is a
principle of action and the noblest in the world."

From the first day when he saw her, Isabel's beauty had dazzled him;
and he needed very little time to discover that, until the last moment
of his life, no other woman would ever mean anything to him. The same
irresistible and deliberate impulse drove Isabel towards Simon.
Brought up in the south of France, speaking French as her native
tongue, she did not feel and did not evoke in Simon the sense of
embarrassment that almost invariably arises from a difference of
nationality. That which united them was infinitely stronger than that
which divided them.

It was a curious thing, but during these past four months, while love
was blossoming within them like a plant whose flowers were constantly
renewed and constantly increasing in beauty, they had had none of
those long conversations in which lovers eagerly question each other
and in which each seeks to find entrance into the unknown territory
of the other's soul. They spoke little and rarely of themselves, as
though they had delegated to gentle daily life the task of raising the
veils of the mystery one by one.

Simon knew only that Isabel was not happy. After losing at the age of
fifteen a mother whom she adored, she failed to find in her father the
love and the caresses that might have consoled her. Moreover, Lord
Bakefield almost immediately fell under the dominion of the Duchess of
Faulconbridge, a vain, tyrannical woman, who rarely stirred from her
villa at Cannes or her country-seat near Battle, but whose malign
influence exerted itself equally close at hand and far away, in speech
and by letter, on her husband and on he