Through her half-closed eyelids she watched Terence lying back in his chair, and she smiled as she saw how big his mouth was, and his chin so small, and his nose curved like a switchback with a knob at the end.  Naturally, looking like that he was lazy, and ambitious, and full of moods and faults.  She remembered their quarrels, and in particular how they had been quarreling about Helen that very afternoon, and she thought how often they would quarrel in the thirty, or forty, or fifty years in which they would be living in the same house together, catching trains together, and getting annoyed because they were so different.  But all this was superficial, and had nothing to do with the life that went on beneath the eyes and the mouth and the chin, for that life was independent of her, and independent of everything else.  So too, although she was going to marry him and to live with him for thirty, or forty, or fifty years, and to quarrel, and to be so close to him, she was independent of him; she was independent of everything else.  Nevertheless, as St. John said, it was love that made her understand this, for she had never felt this independence, this calm, and this certainty until she fell in love with him, and perhaps this too was love.  She wanted nothing else.

For perhaps two minutes Miss Allan had been standing at a little distance looking at the couple lying back so peacefully in their arm-chairs.  She could not make up her mind whether to disturb them or not, and then, seeming to recollect something, she came across the hall.  The sound of her approach woke Terence, who sat up and rubbed his eyes.  He heard Miss Allan talking to Rachel.

“Well,” she was saying, “this is very nice.  It is very nice indeed.  Getting engaged seems to be quite the fashion.  It cannot often happen that two couples who have never seen each other before meet in the same hotel and decide to get married.”  Then she paused and smiled, and seemed to have nothing more to say, so that Terence rose and asked her whether it was true that she had finished her book.  Some one had said that she had really finished it.  Her face lit up; she turned to him with a livelier expression than usual.

“Yes, I think I can fairly say I have finished it,” she said.  “That is, omitting Swinburne—­Beowulf to Browning—­I rather like the two B’s myself.  Beowulf to Browning,” she repeated, “I think that is the kind of title which might catch one’s eye on a railway book-stall.”

She was indeed very proud that she had finished her book, for no one knew what an amount of determination had gone to the making of it.  Also she thought that it was a good piece of work, and, considering what anxiety she had been in about her brother while she wrote it, she could not resist telling them a little more about it.

“I must confess,” she continued, “that if I had known how many classics there are in English literature, and how verbose the best of them contrive to be, I should never have undertaken the work.  They only allow one seventy thousand words, you see.”