since last
Sunday week."

"There you're right, Mrs. Elliot!" he shouted, starting out of the
temperate past. "We haven't altered." With a rare flash of insight he
turned on Rickie. "I see your game. You don't care about ME drinking, or
to shake MY hand. It's some one else you want to cure--as it were,
that old photograph. You talk to me, but all the time you look at the
photograph." He snatched it up.

"I've my own ideas of good manners, and to look friends between the eyes
is one of them; and this"--he tore the photograph across "and this"--he
tore it again--"and these--" He flung the pieces at the man, who had
sunk into a chair. "For my part, I'm off."

Then Rickie was heroic no longer. Turning round in his chair, he covered
his face. The man was right. He did not love him, even as he had never
hated him. In either passion he had degraded him to be a symbol for the
vanished past. The man was right, and would have been lovable. He longed
to be back riding over those windy fields, to be back in those mystic
circles, beneath pure sky. Then they could have watched and helped and
taught each other, until the word was a reality, and the past not a torn
photograph, but Demeter the goddess rejoicing in the spring. Ah, if he
had seized those high opportunities! For they led to the highest of all,
the symbolic moment, which, if a man accepts, he has accepted life.

The voice of Agnes, which had lured him then ("For my sake," she had
whispered), pealed over him now in triumph. Abruptly it broke into sobs
that had the effect of rain. He started up. The anger had died out of
Stephen's face, not for a subtle reason but because here was a woman,
near him, and unhappy.

She tried to apologize, and brought on a fresh burst of tears. Something
had upset her. They heard her locking the door of her room. From that
moment their intercourse was changed.

"Why does she keep crying today?" mused Rickie, as if he spoke to some
mutual friend.

"I can make a guess," said Stephen, and his heavy face flushed.

"Did you insult her?" he asked feebly.

"But who's Gerald?"

Rickie raised his hand to his mouth.

"She looked at me as if she knew me, and then gasps 'Gerald,' and
started crying."

"Gerald is the name of some one she once knew."

"So I thought." There was a long silence, in which they could hear a
piteous gulping cough. "Where is he now?" asked Stephen.

"Dead."

"And then you--?"

Rickie nodded.

"Bad, this sort