“What is it?” said Ashe at length.  “What is the matter?”

She looked at him gravely.

“Gloom,” she said.  “Despondency, Mr. Marson—­A sort of flat feeling.  Don’t you hate things happening?”

“I don’t quite understand.”

“Well, this affair of Aline, for instance.  It’s so big it makes one feel as though the whole world had altered.  I should like nothing to happen ever, and life just to jog peacefully along.  That’s not the gospel I preached to you in Arundell Street, is it!  I thought I was an advanced apostle of action; but I seem to have changed.  I’m afraid I shall never be able to make clear what I do mean.  I only know I feel as though I have suddenly grown old.  These things are such milestones.  Already I am beginning to look on the time before Aline behaved so sensationally as terribly remote.  To-morrow it will be worse, and the day after that worse still.  I can see that you don’t in the least understand what I mean.”

“Yes; I do—­or I think I do.  What it comes to, in a few words, is that somebody you were fond of has gone out of your life.  Is that it?”

Joan nodded.

“Yes—­at least, that is partly it.  I didn’t really know Aline particularly well, beyond having been at school with her, but you’re right.  It’s not so much what has happened as what it represents that matters.  This elopement has marked the end of a phase of my life.  I think I have it now.  My life has been such a series of jerks.  I dash along—­then something happens which stops that bit of my life with a jerk; and then I have to start over again—­a new bit.  I think I’m getting tired of jerks.  I want something stodgy and continuous.

“I’m like one of the old bus horses that could go on forever if people got off without making them stop.  It’s the having to get the bus moving again that wears one out.  This little section of my life since we came here is over, and it is finished for good.  I’ve got to start the bus going again on a new road and with a new set of passengers.  I wonder whether the old horses used to be sorry when they dropped one lot of passengers and took on a lot of strangers?”

A sudden dryness invaded Ashe’s throat.  He tried to speak, but found no words.  Joan went on: 

“Do you ever get moods when life seems absolutely meaningless?  It’s like a badly-constructed story, with all sorts of characters moving in and out who have nothing to do with the plot.  And when somebody comes along that you think really has something to do with the plot, he suddenly drops out.  After a while you begin to wonder what the story is about, and you feel that it’s about nothing—­just a jumble.”

“There is one thing,” said Ashe, “that knits it together.”

“What is that?”

“The love interest.”

Their eyes met and suddenly there descended on Ashe confidence.  He felt cool and alert, sure of himself, as in the old days he had felt when he ran races and, the nerve-racking hours of waiting past, he listened for the starter’s gun.  Subconsciously he was aware he had always been a little afraid of Joan, and that now he was no longer afraid.