Now he had come to the Villa Miraflores.  This was his house.  Yet he entered the gate like a thief, and crept along the shadow of the wall that enclosed his own gardens.  The magnolias stood blazing white on the lawns, the stiff scarlet poinsettias twitched resentfully under the poising fireflies’ weight, and from the dark geraniums scent rose like a smoke.  He would have liked to go to her with an armful of flowers, but he did not dare to go out into the light.  He passed the door that led from his to de Rojas’ garden, which had been made when a father and son had been tenants of the two houses, and which had never been blocked up because de Rojas and he were such good neighbours.  If it had not been unlocked to-night, if the marble summerhouse were empty....  He stood in the pillared portico and did not dare go in.  He thought of the temple, not so very much unlike this, on a far-off Essex hillside, where his mother used to meet his father; and somehow this made him feel that if Mariquita had failed him it would be a bitter shame and dishonour to him.  Very slowly, rehearsing cruel things that he would say to her to-morrow, he opened the door and let the moonbeams search the summerhouse.  It showed a huddled figure that wailed a little as it saw the light.  He shut the door and moved into the darkness, taking his woman in his arms, finding her lips....

It had all gone.  He could remember nothing of it.  He could remember nothing of the joy that had thralled him for two years, that by its ending had desolated him for two more and alienated him from women.  He knew as a matter of historical fact that he had been her lover, but it meant no more to him than his knowledge that Antony had once loved Cleopatra and Nelson Lady Hamilton; of the quality of her kisses, the magic that must have filled these hours, he could recollect nothing.  Perhaps it was not fair to blame her for that.  Perhaps it was not her fault but the fault of Nature, who is so determined that men shall go on love-making that she makes the delights of love the least memorable of all.  But it was her fault that she had given him nothing spiritual to remember.  When he came to think of it, she had hardly ever said anything that one could carry away with one.  She was one of those women who moan a lot, and one cannot get any solid satisfaction out of repeating a moan to oneself.  He grinned as he thought of the alarm of his laboratory boy if he should ever try in some cheerless stretch of his work to remind himself of Mariquita by saying over to himself her characteristic moan.  Nothing she had ever said or done when they were lovers was half so real to him as the tears she shed when she cast him off because the priest had told her that she must; when she broke the tie between them with a blank dismissal which, if it had been given by a man to a woman, these Suffragettes would have called a Vile betrayal.