Her pause had been enough for Eugenia to drop back into her own world.  She said thoughtfully, “I’ve half a notion to try going straight on beyond Biskra, to the south, if I could find a caravan that would take me.  That would be something new.  Biskra is so commonplace now that it has been discovered and exploited.”  She went on, with a deep, wistful note of plaintiveness in her voice, “But everything’s so commonplace now!” and added, “There’s Java.  I’ve never been to Java.”

It came over Marise with a shock of strangeness that this was the end of Eugenia in her life.  Somehow she knew, as though Eugenia had told her, that she was never coming back again.  As they stood there, so close together, in the attitude of friends, they were so far apart that each could scarcely recognize who the other was.  Their paths which in youth had lain so close to each other as to seem identical, how widely they had been separated by a slight divergence of aim!  Marise was struck by her sudden perception of this.  It had been going on for years, she could understand that now.  Why should she only see it in this quiet, silent, neutral moment?

An impalpable emanation of feeling reached her from the other woman.  She had a divination that it was pain.  Perhaps Eugenia was also suddenly realizing that she had grown irrevocably apart from an old friend.

The old tenderness felt for the girl Eugenia had been, by the girl Marise had been, looked wistfully down the years at the end.

Marise opened her arms wide and took Eugenia into them for a close, deeply moved embrace.

“Good-bye, Eugenia,” she said, with sadness.

“Good-bye, Marise,” said Eugenia, looking at her strangely.

* * * * *

Neale came back now, frankly consulting his watch with Neale’s bluntness in such matters.  “Train’s due in a minute or two,” he said.  “Where’s Mr. Welles?”

Marise said, “Over there, with Paul.  I’ll go tell them.”

She found them both, hand in hand, sitting on the edge of the truck which carried the leather-covered boxes and wicker basket-trunks, bound for Biskra or beyond, or Java; and the square department-store trunk bound for Maple Avenue, Macon, Georgia.

“Mother,” said Paul, “Mr. Welles has promised me that he’ll come up and visit us summers.”

“There’s no house in the world where you’ll be more welcome,” said Marise with all her heart, holding out her hand.

Mr. Welles shook it hard, and held it in both his.  As the train whistled screamingly at the crossing, he looked earnestly into her face and tried to tell her something, but the words would not come.

As she read in his pale old face and steady eyes what he would have said, Marise cried out to herself that there do not exist in the world any things more halting and futile than words.  She put her arms around his neck and kissed him.  “Good-bye, dear Mr. Welles,” was all she said, but in the clinging of his old arms about her, and in the quivering, shining face he showed as they moved down the platform together, she knew that he too had not needed words.