“Helen!  Why not?  I thought you would be keen on it.  I thought you were game to go anywhere!” Amazement and dismay were in his eyes.

She rose slowly, went over to the mantel-piece, moved some little porcelain figures, then put them back again.

When at length she spoke, she steadied her voice with an effort.

“Ronnie dear, Central Africa is not a place for a woman.”

“But, my dearest girl, a woman arrives there in my story!  She crawls into the long grass with the man she loves, and disappears.  Our missionary’s bride did it.  Where a woman could not go, I must not go for my local colour.  Oh, I say, Helen!  You won’t fail me?”

He walked over to the window, and drummed again, with restless, nervous fingers, upon the In hoc vince pane.

She came behind him, laying her hand on his shoulder.

“Darling, it will break my heart if you think I am failing you.  But, while you have been talking, I have faced the matter out, and—­I must tell you at once—­I cannot feel it either right or possible to go.  I could not be away just now, for seven months.  This place must be looked after.  Think of the little church we are building in the village; the farms changing tenants this summer; the hundred and one things I, and I only, must settle and arrange.  You never see the bailiff; you hardly know the tenants; you do not oversee the workpeople.  So you can scarcely judge, dear Ronnie, how important is my presence here; how almost impossible it would be for me suddenly to go completely out of reach.  My darling—­if you keep to it, if you really intend to go, we must face the fact that it will mean, for us, a long parting.”

The tension of suspense held the stillness of the room.

Then:  “It is my profession,” said Ronald West, huskily.  “It is my career.”

She moved round and faced him.  They stood looking at one another, dumbly.

She knew all that was in his mind, and most that was in his heart.

He knew nothing of that which filled her mind at the moment, and only partly realised the great, unselfish love for him which filled her heart.

He was completely understood.  He rested in that fact, without in the least comprehending his own lack of comprehension.

Moving close to him, she laid both hands upon his shoulders, hiding her face in silence against his breast.

He stroked her soft hair—­helplessly, tenderly.

With his whole heart he loved her, leaned upon her, needed her.  She had done everything for him; been everything to him.

But he meant to carry his point.  He intended to go to Central Africa, and it was no sort of good pretending he did not.  You never pretended with Helen, because she saw through you immediately, and usually told you so.

He had not spent a single night away from her since that wonderful day when, calm and radiant, she had moved up the church in presence of an admiring crowd, and taken her place at his side.