By this time his command is his own.  His face is as calm as a mask.  His large eyes, somewhat bloodshot now from hours of smoking and a sleepless night, rest upon her with cold enquiry.

She has seen them once, met them once, fixed, liquid, with passionate longing upon hers; desperately she seeks in them now for one gleam of the same light, but there is none.  They and his face are cloaked in a cold reserve.  Sick, and with her heart beating to suffocation, she says, as he waits for her to explain her presence: 

“We are—­going away.”

Stephen’s heart seems to contract at the words he had so often dreaded to hear, heard at last.

His thoughts take a greyer hopelessness.

“Oh, really!” he says merely, the shock he feels only slightly intensifying his habitual drawl.  “Not immediately, I hope?”

Nothing to the nervous, excited, over-strained girl before him could be more galling, more humiliating, more crushing than the cold, conventional politeness of his tones and words.

This frightful fence of Society manner that he will put between them—­a slight, delicate defence, is as effectual as if he caused a precipice by magic to yawn between them.

“No—­not—­not—­quite immediately, but soon,” she falters.  “And it seems as if I could not exist if—­I—­never see you.”

There is a strained pause while they stand facing each other.  He is motionless; one hand rests in his pocket, the other hangs nerveless at his side.

They look at each other.  Each is thinking of the supreme delight—­even if momentary—­the other’s embrace could give if—­but the conditions in the respective minds are different—­in his:  “If I thought it wise;” in hers:  “If he only would.”

“Well, we can write to each other,” he says at last.

“Oh, but what are letters?” the girl says passionately; and then, urged on hard by her love for him, her intuition of his love for her, and her common-sense instinct not to throw away her life’s happiness for a misunderstanding or petty feeling of pride, she adds:  “You know—­don’t you?—­that I care for you more than anything else in the world.”

Her tones are sharp with the intensity of feeling, and she stretches both hands imploringly a little way towards him.

He sees them quiver and her face whiten, and the frightened appeal increase in her pained eyes searching his face, and it is a marvel—­later, he marvels at it himself—­how, with his own passion keen and alive in him, he maintains his ground.  But there is something in the whole scene that jars upon him—­something theatrical that makes the thought flash upon him:  Is it a got-up thing?

This puts him on the defensive directly; besides, he resents her coming to him in this way, and endeavouring to surprise from him words he has already explained to her he is unwilling to say.

She is trying to rush him, he puts it to himself; and the thought rouses all his own obstinacy and self-will.