She had, after all, the grace of her ignorance and innocence.  If she had had no pity on me, it was because she was as blind as she had said I was.  She didn’t, she couldn’t see me as she had made me see myself.  She didn’t know that she had any power over me, or else she wouldn’t have used her power; she was too honourable for that, too chivalrous.  You could trust her to play the game until she threw it up and left it.

And I passed again in my sullen tramping, and I looked at her for the third time, urged by the remorse that stung me.  And this time she drew me so that I went over to her and sat by her.  I looked at my watch, we had been two hours on board.

I had left her two hours alone; and in those two hours she had suffered.  Her face was set now in a sort of brooding fear and anguish; her breathing had a tremor in it, as if her heart dragged at her side.  It was better, far better, that we should quarrel than she should suffer and sit quivering in silence and see frightful things.

But I saw that she wasn’t going to quarrel, she wasn’t going to pitch into me; she wasn’t going to assert herself and domineer over me just now.  This agony of hers had made her gentle, so that she spoke to me as if she were sorry for me after all.

“Are you tired,” she said, “of tramping up and down?”

“Horribly tired.”

“Put my rug round you if you’re going to sit still.  Norah wouldn’t let you sit still without a rug.”

“Norah wouldn’t let me do anything I shouldn’t do.”

She smiled down at me, still sad, but with the least little flicker of irony on the top of her sadness.  “Norah’s job isn’t very hard.  You don’t ever want to do anything you shouldn’t.”

“Oh—­don’t I?”

“No, never.  That’s the pull you have over naughty people like me.  You’re so good.”

“It wasn’t my goodness you were rubbing into me the other night.”

“Never mind the other night.  It doesn’t matter what I said the other night.  Only what I’m saying now this minute has any importance.  But it was your goodness, if it comes to that.”

“Queer sort of goodness.”  I was still, you see, a little stung.

“All goodness,” she said, “is queer, carried to that pitch.  But you’re a dear in spite of it.  I won’t bully you.”

We made the last part of the crossing on the highway of the sunset.  The propeller lashed through crimson and fiery copper, and the white wake tossed on to the highway turned to rose and gold and its edges to purple.

I had left her again and I called to her to look at this wonder of the sky and sea; but she shook her head at me.  There was no need to call her.  She had looked.  I could see by her eyes that the intolerable beauty had brought Jevons back to her.  He was there for her in all beauty and in all wonder.

Then she called to me.  “Wally, come here.  I want to speak to you.”