“I’m afraid you must reconstruct your ideas of me, Ishmael,” she said, with an air of candour that struck him as worthy of her even through his pain.  “You think of me as something ethereal and angelic, and I’m not.  I’m only a woman, Ishmael, and the little things of life—­friendship, beauty, one’s own kin—­mean so much to me.”

He had a confused idea she must mean the big things, but he waited silently.

“Ishmael!” she said desperately; “it’s no good, I’m not the sort of woman who can throw up the whole of life for one thing.  You will think me mercenary, worldly, but I’m not; the old ties are too strong for me, and I can’t break them.  It’s my heart that breaks....  Oh, Ishmael, Ishmael, I loved you so!”

Through all the inconsistencies of her words two salient facts stood out to Ishmael—­she was unhappy, and through him.  His own pain lay numb, a thing to be realised when he roamed the fields alone, and still more intimately known when he had it for bed-and-hearth fellow in his dreary house.  Nature has provided that a great blow shall always stun for a time; sensation stays quiescent as long as there still remains something to be done; it is in the lonely hours after all action is over that pain makes itself felt.  Ishmael, if asked then, would have said his heart was broken, but long afterwards he would see that no such merciful thing had happened, and marvel how the cord of suffering can be strained to breaking-point and kept taut, yet never snap.  He was yet to learn that no pain is unbearable, for the simple reason that it has to be borne.

“There’s nothing to blame yourself about,” he said.  “You’ve given me the most beautiful things to remember, and it’s not your fault you can’t give more.  When I think of what you are and what I have to offer I feel I couldn’t let you give more even if you would....”  Always unfluent of speech, he stopped abruptly, while a wheel of thought whirred round so swiftly in his brain that he only caught a blurred impression.  Ishmael had had, perforce, to live as far as his mental life went in a world of books, and with a vague resentment he felt that books had not played him fair.  Surely he had read, many times, of women who had thought the world well lost for love—­the hackneyed expression came so readily to him.  “She cares for me,” he thought, with an odd mingling of triumph and pain, “only she doesn’t care enough.  It’s a half-shade, and the books don’t prepare one for the half-shades.  Nobody can love without a flaw—­we all fail each other somewhere; it’s like no one being quite good or quite bad:  nothing is black or white, but just varying tones of grey.  They make life damned difficult, the half-shades!”

Giving his shoulders a little shake, he turned to Blanche.  “I must go,” he said gently.  “Good-bye, Blanche!”

She held out both her hands, and he took them in his, repeating, “Good-bye, Blanche!”

Then she made her only mistake; she swayed towards him, her face held up to his in a last invitation.  Roughly he put her hands away.