I began to speak—­as if I had not spoken for years.  The house seemed to be coming to life; there were noises of opening doors, of voices outside.

“I believe you care enough,” I said “to give it all up for me.  I believe you do, and I want you.”  I continued to pace up and down.  The noises of returning day grew loud; frightfully loud.  It was as if I must hasten, must get said what I had to say, as if I must raise my voice to make it heard amid the clamour of a world awakening to life.

“I believe you do ...  I believe you do....”  I said again and again, “and I want you.”  My voice rose higher and higher.  She stood motionless, an inscrutable white figure, like some silent Greek statue, a harmony of falling folds of heavy drapery perfectly motionless.

“I want you,” I said—­“I want you, I want you, I want you.”  It was unbearable to myself.

“Oh, be quiet,” she said at last.  “Be quiet!  If you had wanted me I have been here.  It is too late.  All these days; all these—­”

“But ...”  I said.

From without someone opened the great shutters of the windows, and the light from the outside world burst in upon us.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

We parted in London next day, I hardly know where.  She seemed so part of my being, was for me so little more than an intellectual force, so little of a physical personality, that I cannot remember where my eyes lost sight of her.

I had desolately made the crossing from country to country, had convoyed my aunt to her big house in one of the gloomy squares in a certain district, and then we had parted.  Even afterward it was as if she were still beside me, as if I had only to look round to find her eyes upon me.  She remained the propelling force, I a boat thrust out upon a mill-pond, moving more and more slowly.  I had been for so long in the shadow of that great house, shut in among the gloom, that all this light, this blazing world—­it was a June day in London—­seemed impossible, and hateful.  Over there, there had been nothing but very slow, fading minutes; now there was a past, a future.  It was as if I stood between them in a cleft of unscalable rocks.

I went about mechanically, made arrangements for my housing, moved in and out of rooms in the enormous mausoleum of a club that was all the home I had, in a sort of stupor.  Suddenly I remembered that I had been thinking of something; that she had been talking of Churchill.  I had had a letter from him on the morning of the day before.  When I read it, Churchill and his “Cromwell” had risen in my mind like preposterous phantoms; the one as unreal as the other—­as alien.  I seemed to have passed an infinity of aeons beyond them.  The one and the other belonged as absolutely to the past as a past year belongs.  The thought of them did not bring with it the tremulously unpleasant sensations that, as a rule, come with the thoughts of a too recent temps jadis, but rather as a vein of rose across a gray evening.  I had passed his letter over; had dropped it half-read among the litter of the others.  Then there had seemed to be a haven into whose mouth I was drifting.