I came.

“You thought I was going to leave Jimmy.  But I wasn’t. He knew I wasn’t.  Why, the first night I knew how impossible it was.”

I said, Yes.  Of course it was impossible.  And of course he knew.

“I shan’t mind if only we can get to him before anything happens.”

I said nothing would happen, and of course we should get to him.

She was silent so long that I was startled when she said, “Wally—­your nervous aren’t you, are they?”

I said, No.  No.  Of course they weren’t.

I knew what she was thinking.  Out of the intolerable beauty she had seen Jimmy rise with all his gestures.  She heard the cracking of his knuckles and saw the jerking of his thumb.  And these things became tender and pathetic and dear to her as if he were dead.

And she had seen herself shudder at them as if it had been another woman who shuddered, a strange and pitiless woman whom she hated.

“It wouldn’t matter so much if he had wanted to go,” she said.

“Why do you keep on saying that he didn’t want to go?”

“Because he said so.  He said he was only going because he couldn’t go.”

“I think you’re doing him a great injustice.  He told me he wanted to go; I’ve no doubt he did want to go—­just like any other man.”

“Yes.  To be just like any other man—­that’s what he wanted.  But he couldn’t be.  He isn’t like any other man.  And so it’s worse for him.  Can’t you see that it’s worse for him?  It’ll hurt him more.”

I said I didn’t see it, and that she was absurd and morbid and utterly unreasonable, and that she was making Jimmy out unreasonable and morbid and absurd.

She told me then I didn’t understand either of them; and we were silent, as if we had quarrelled again, until we came in sight of the Flemish coast.

We sailed into Ostend on the tail-end of the sunset.  What was left of it was enough to keep up for us the intense moment of transfiguration, so that we didn’t miss it.  The long white Digue, the towers, the domes of the casinos and hotels, the high, flat fronts of the houses showed soaked in light, quivering with light.  Ostend might have been some enchanted Eastern city.  It was as if the heroic land faced us with the illusion of enchantment, to cover the desolation that lay beyond her dykes.

And we who looked at it were still silent, not now as if we had quarrelled, but as if this beauty had made peace between us.

Viola’s face had changed.  It reminded me in the oddest way of her brother Reggie’s.  I think that for the moment, while it lasted, she had forgotten Jimmy, she had forgotten her brother Reggie; she had touched the fringe of the immensity that had drawn them from her and swallowed them up.  And in forgetting them she had forgotten her unhappy self.