“Well, I have inherited the earth.  I am the worm at the very heart of the rose of it.  You are thinking that all that I have gained is the hand of Gurnard.  But it is more than that.  It is a matter of a chess-board; and Gurnard is the only piece that remains.  And I am the hand that moves him.  As for a marriage; well, it is a marriage of minds, a union for a common purpose.  But mine is the master mind.  As for you.  Well, you have parted with your past ... and there is no future for you.  That is true.  You have nowhere to go to; have nothing left, nothing in the world.  That is true too.  But what is that to me?  A set of facts—­that you have parted with your past and have no future.  You had to do the work; I had to make you do it.  I chose you because you would do it.  That is all....  I knew you; knew your secret places, your weaknesses.  That is my power.  I stand for the Inevitable, for the future that goes on its way; you for the past that lies by the roadside.  If for your sake I had swerved one jot from my allotted course, I should have been untrue.  There was a danger, once, for a minute....  But I stood out against it.  What would you have had me do?  Go under as Fox went under?  Speak like him, look as he looks now....  Me?  Well, I did not.”

“I was in the hands of the future; I never swerved; I went on my way.  I had to judge men as I judged you; to corrupt, as I corrupted you.  I cajoled; I bribed; I held out hopes; and with every one, as with you, I succeeded.  It is in that power that the secret of the greatness which is virtue, lies.  I had to set about a work of art, of an art strange to you; as strange, as alien as the arts of dead peoples.  You are the dead now, mine the art of an ensuing day.  All that remains to you is to fold your hands and wonder, as you wondered before the gates of Nineveh.  I had to sound the knell of the old order; of your virtues, of your honours, of your faiths, of ... of altruism, if you like.  Well, it is sounded.  I was forever on the watch; I foresaw; I forestalled; I have never rested.  And you....”

“And I ...”  I said, “I only loved you.”

There was a silence.  I seemed for a moment to see myself a tenuous, bodiless thing, like a ghost in a bottomless cleft between the past and the to come.  And I was to be that forever.

“You only loved me,” she repeated.  “Yes, you loved me.  But what claim upon me does that give you?  You loved me....  Well, if I had loved you it would have given you a claim....  All your misery; your heartache comes from ... from love; your love for me, your love for the things of the past, for what was doomed....  You loved the others too ... in a way, and you betrayed them and you are wretched.  If you had not loved them you would not be wretched now; if you had not loved me you would not have betrayed your—­your very self.  At the first you stood alone; as much alone as I. All these people were nothing to you.  I was nothing to you.  But you must needs love them