“Why?” I said, merely drawing my chair close to hers and putting my arm round her shoulders.

“That is just what I can’t tell you,” she answered.  “Not now.  When I come back I will tell you, but I don’t want to now.  But I have a good reason, one which you will understand when you know it.  But do just let me go now as I wish, without questions.  I have thought it over so much, and I am sure I am doing the right thing.”

“You have thought it over?” I repeated in surprise.  “Since when?  Since this morning, do you mean?”

“No, long before that.  Suzee’s letter has only decided me to speak now.  I have been meaning to ask you to let me go for some time, only I put it off because I thought you would dislike it so and would feel dull without me.  But now, if you let me leave you, you can go to Suzee for a time, and she will amuse and occupy you, and if you want me at the end of the year I will come back.”

The blood surged up to my head as I listened.  How could she deliberately suggest such things?

Did she really care for me or value our love at all?

In any case, for no reason on earth would I let her go.

“No, I shall not, certainly not, consent to anything so foolish,” I said coldly; “I can’t think how you can suggest or think such a thing is possible.”

Viola was silent for a moment.  Then she said: 

“When I come back I would tell you everything, and you would see I was right.”

“I don’t know that you ever would come back,” I said, with sudden irrepressible anger.

“If you go away I might want you to stay away.  You talk as if our emotions and passions were mere blocks of wood we could take up and lay down as we pleased, put away in a box for a time, and then bring them out again to play with.  It’s absurd.  You talk of going away and driving me to another woman, and then my coming back to you, as if it was just a simple matter of our own will.  Once we separate and allow our lives to become entangled with other lives we cannot say what will happen.  We might never come together again.”

Viola inclined her head.

“I know,” she said in a low tone.  “I have thought of all that.  But if I stay there will be a separation all the same, and perhaps something worse.”

“What do you mean by a separation?” I demanded hotly.

“Well, I cannot respond to you any more as I used.  I must have rest for a time,” she answered in a low tone.

I looked at her closely, and it struck me again how delicate she looked.  She was thinner, too, than she had been.  Her delicate, almost transparent hand shook as it rested on the chair arm.

The colour rushed burning to my face as I leant over her.

“But, darling girl, if you want more rest you have only to say so.  Perhaps I have been thoughtless and selfish.  If so, we must alter things.  But there is no need to separate, to go away from me for that.”