would be my other self? You know you could not share me. We could not hold each other, like this, and love each other, if Malcolm stood before us now.”

“I know,” he said, and his deep fatigue was in his voice. “Perhaps one must accept that there is loss and suffering always. Perhaps Malcolm does grieve to see you with me. Who can tell? I can’t. I can only say that I don’t feel it so. I can only say that if I felt it so I’d not want to marry you; I couldn’t want you if I felt it so. And even if you yourself felt him so near and real that my love could only hurt you, I’d go away and leave you in peace. But it’s not like that, Tony. It wouldn’t be to leave you in peace. You couldn’t bear to have me go. Something quite different has happened. You’ve fallen in love with me.”

She sat silent in his arms, her head still leaning on his shoulder, and he knew from her slow, careful breathing that she was intensely thinking and that he had not helped her. If only he had not been so tired to begin with, perhaps he might have found something more. But he was now horribly tired and his artificial leg began to pull at him, and though he sat very still, she must at last have guessed at his growing exhaustion, for, raising herself, she drew away, saying, in a dulled and gentle voice: “Shall we walk back? Your leg must be getting stiff.”

He took her hand as she stood beside him and kissed it without speaking, and he saw that she turned her head away then to hide her tears.

They walked slowly up toward the house by the winding path among the heather. Wyndwards stood high and they had to climb a little. Only when they drew near did she speak, and in a trembling voice.

“You’ve shown me all the truth. I’ve been unfaithful. I am unfaithful. If I’d loved him enough, if I’d loved him as he should have been loved, I couldn’t have fallen in love with you.”

“Perhaps,” said the young man.

“What I say to myself is this,” Antonia went on. “If he had been alive and had gone away, as you said, to Australia or Patagonia, and during his absence I had grown fond of you and fallen in love—what I say to myself is that of course I should have fought against the feeling and avoided seeing you, and when he came back I should have confessed to him what had happened. And he would have forgiven me. It would make him very unhappy; but I know that Malcolm would forgive me.”

“Right you are, my dear Tony; he would. And you’d have fallen out of love with me and gone on living happily ever after.”

She ignored his jaded lightness. “Well—isn’t it like that now? Can’t I do that now?” She stopped in the little path and her soft, exhausted face dwelt on him.

“No,” said Bevis patiently, but his own exhaustion was in his voice; “it isn’t like that now. As I’ve said, the difference is that he won’t come back; that he is dead.”

“But immortal, Bevis.”

“I believe, immortal.”

“Couldn’t I in the same way, when I find him again, confess and be forgiven?”

“You’d not need to, my child.” A certain dryness was in his voice. “He knows all about it, I imagine; and more than you do.”

“You mean that he knows and has forgiven already?”

“He hasn’t much to forgive!” Bevis could not repress, with a drier smile.

“You are unkind.”

“I know. Forgive me, Tony dear; but you are tormenting. Don’t let us talk about it any more. There’s nothing to be gained by it.”

“I don’t mean to be tormenting. Isn’t it for your sake, too?”

“I can bear more,” he laughed now, “if you can assure me of that!”

“There may be a way out, Bevis; there may be a way out, although you can’t show it to me, although I can’t find it yet. Because you don’t feel as I do; and you may be right and I wrong. You do believe that everything is changed, quite changed, after we die? You do believe that it does not hurt him?”

He was aware, with a dim, a tender irony, of the so feminine impulse in her that, when she no longer found any help in him, sought help for herself in her own misconceptions of his beliefs. Irony deepened a little, and tenderness, as he set her straight.

“I don’t believe it hurts him; but I don’t believe, either, that everything is changed. It depends on what you call change.”

“You believe it’s all peace and love; that people there don’t feel in the way we do here?” She was supplicating him.

“You might put it like that, perhaps,” he acquiesced, “though even here we feel peace and love sometimes.” And, glancing up at the house, as she had laid her hand on his arm, he added: “Miss Latimer is looking out at us. Don’t take your hand off quickly, all the same.”

She had not controlled herself, however, from glancing round at the house, in an upper window of which they saw a curtain fall.

“It makes no difference,” she said. “She must know why you are here. She must know that I am very fond of you.”

“You mean she must know how faithless? There’s no point in her thinking you faithless—unless you’re going to be, is there?”

“Why do you gibe at me,” she murmured, “and taunt me, when I need help most of all? Why are you so dry and cold?”

“My dear,” he said, “I’m frightfully tired. You’re twice as strong as I am, and I think my case is safer in your hands than in my own. That’s what it comes to. I’m not dry and cold. Only worn out. What I’d like”—and putting his hand within her arm, indifferent to the possible spectator, he glanced round at her with a smile half melancholy and half whimsical—“would be to be with you in the firelight somewhere, and stillness; and to put my head on your breast and go to sleep, for hours and hours; held in your arms. Is that cold, Tony?”