The cardinal principle of his life, if such a thing could be stated in a phrase, was self-expression through self-discipline.  Well, his discovery was (it didn’t come to much more than a surmise, it is true, but it was a beginning) that in his relations to Rose he’d never disciplined himself at all.  The network of his instincts, passions, desires, that had involved her, had been allowed to grow unchecked, unscrutinized.  He didn’t begin to scrutinize them now.  He was in no mind for the task.  How could he undertake it until the fearful hope that he was actually on the way to her now should have been answered one way or the other!

It proved a vain hope.  The person who answered his ring at the door of the little bungalow, on that wonderful sun-bathed, rose-scented morning (false auguries that mocked his disappointment and made it almost intolerable) was Portia.

She flushed at sight of him, then almost as quickly went pale.  She stepped outside the door and closed it behind her before she spoke.

“I’m afraid I mustn’t let mother know you’re here,” she said.  “She’s not been well these last days and she mustn’t be excited.  I don’t want to let her suspect that things have changed or in any way gone wrong with Rose.  I told her I was going out for a walk.  Will you come with me?”

He nodded and did not even speak until they’d got safely away from the house.  Then: 

“I came out here,” he said, “almost sure that I should find her.  Isn’t she here?”

“No,” said Portia.  Then she added with a sort of gasp, as if she’d tried to check her words in their very utterance, “Don’t you know her better than that?”

“Do you know where she is?”

This question she didn’t answer at all.  They walked on a dozen paces in silence.

“Portia,” he demanded, “is she ill?  You’ll have to tell me that.”

Even this question she didn’t answer immediately.  “No,” she said at last.  “She’s not ill.  I’ll take the responsibility of telling you that.”

“You mean that’s all you will tell me?” he persisted.  “Why?  On her instructions?”

“I think we’ll have to sit down somewhere,” said Portia.  “Beside the road over there where it’s shady.”

“I got a letter from Rose yesterday,” she said, after they’d been seated for a while.  “She asked me in it not to go on writing you the little—­bulletins that I’d been sending every week; not to tell you anything at all.  So you see I’ve gone rather beyond her instructions in saying even as much as I have.”

“And you,” he asked quickly; “you mean to comply with a request like that?”

“I must,” said Portia.  “I can’t do anything else.”

He made no comment in words, but she interpreted his uncontrollable gesture of angry protest, and answered it.