Surrey scenery and
the weather. It was so formal that by a common impulse we let the topic
suddenly die. We stood through a pause, a hesitation. Were we indeed to
go on at that altitude of cold civility? She turned to the window as if
the view was to serve again.

"Sit down," she said and dropped into a chair against the light, looking
away from me across the wide green space of afternoon sunshine. I sat
down on a little sofa, at a loss also.

"And so," she said, turning her face to me suddenly, "you come back into
my life." And I was amazed to see that the brightness of her eyes was
tears. "We've lived--five years."

"You," I said clumsily, "have done all sorts of things. I hear of
you--patronizing young artists--organizing experiments in village
education."

"Yes," she said, "I've done all sorts of things. One has to. Forced,
unreal things for the most part. You I expect have done--all sorts of
things also.... But yours have been real things...."

"All things," I remarked sententiously, "are real. And all of them a
little unreal. South Africa has been wonderful. And now it is all over
one doubts if it really happened. Like that incredulous mood after a
storm of passion."

"You've come back for good?"

"For good. I want to do things in England."

"Politics?"

"If I can get into that."

Again a pause. There came the characteristic moment of deliberation that
I remembered so well.

"I never meant you," she said, "to go away.... You could have written.
You never answered the notes I sent."

"I was frantic," I said, "with loss and jealousy. I wanted to forget."

"And you forgot?"

"I did my best."

"I did my best," said Mary. "And now---- Have you forgotten?"

"Nothing."

"Nor I. I thought I had. Until I saw you again. I've thought of you
endlessly. I've wanted to talk to you. We had a way of talking together.
But you went away. You turned your back as though all that was
nothing--not worth having. You--you drove home my marriage, Stephen. You
made me know what a thing of sex a woman is to a man--and how little
else...."

She paused.

"You see," I said slowly. "You had made me, as people say, in love with
you.... I don't know--if you remember everything...."

She looked me in the eyes for a moment.

"I hadn't been fair," she said with an abrupt abandonment of accusation.
"But you know, Stephen, that night---- I meant to explain. And
afterwards.... Things sometimes go as one hasn't expected th