As he spoke he turned from her with a sudden, quick hurt in his heart.  It was, after all, only of great importance to himself.  He knew she would be kindly glad that he had got the post he wanted.  Had she not always urged him to some real work?  Had she not pressed him again and again during the last four years, consciously and unconsciously, to bring out all his talents and to do a man’s work in a man’s way?  So she would be simply glad, and she would wave him “God speed,” and would, no doubt, pray for him at those innumerable services she attended, and write to him long, gentle, feminine letters full of details about all sorts of matters, good or indifferent, and she would ask about his health and press him to take care of himself and tell him of any word that was spoken kindly of him here in England.  And she would somehow manage to know, or think she knew, that he was doing great things in the East.  And so, no doubt, in the two years in which he was away there would be no apparent break in this very dear intimacy.  But what, in reality, would he know of her inmost feelings, of her loneliness, of her sufferings, of any repentance that might come to her, any softening towards himself?  He seemed to see all of the two years that were to come in a flash as he stood silent on one side of the neglected tea-table, and Rose stood silent, turning away from him on the other.

When he raised his eyes, he almost felt a surprise that the figure, a little turned away from him, was not dressed in a plain, white frock, and that the shadows and the flickering sunlight making its way through the mulberry leaves were not still upon her; for that was how, through life and in eternity, Rose would be present in the mind of her lover.

Time had gone; it seemed now as nothing.  Whatever changes had come between, he felt as if he saw in the averted face that same expression of sorrowful denial and gentle resistance that had baffled him now for over twelve years.  It was still that his soul asked something of this other purer, gentler, more unworldly, more loving soul, which she, with all her beneficence would not give him.  He did no think of the impracticability of any question of marriage; he did not think in any definite sense of their relations as man and woman.  At other times he had known so frequently just the overpowering wish for the possession of the woman he loved best, but now she stood to him as the history of his moral existence here below, and he felt as if, in missing her, he should miss the object and crown of his life.

At last silence became intolerable.  He moved as though he wanted to speak and could not, and then he said huskily, almost gruffly: 

“It is not ‘good-bye’ to-day, of course,” and then he laughed at the feebleness of his own words.

Rose turned to him at that, and he was not really surprised to see that the tears were flowing rapidly over her cheeks—­tears so large that they splashed like big raindrops on the white hands which were clasped as they hung before her.  But that made it no easier.  He thought very little of those tears; he felt even a little bitter at their apparent bitterness.  He hardened at the sight of those tears; they made him feel that he could leave her with more dignity, more firmness in his own mind, than he had ever thought would be possible.