“And are you happier for that?”

“I was; and I shall be again.”

A little smile curled Pierson’s lips.  “Shall be?” he said.  “I hope so.  It’s just two ways of looking at things, Leila.”

“Oh, Edward!  Don’t be so gentle!  I suppose you don’t think a person like me can ever really love?”

He was standing before her with his head down, and a sense that, naive and bat-like as he was, there was something in him she could not reach or understand, made her cry out: 

“I’ve not been nice to you.  Forgive me, Edward!  I’m so unhappy.”

“There was a Greek who used to say:  ‘God is the helping of man by man.’  It isn’t true, but it’s beautiful.  Good-bye, dear Leila, and don’t be sorrowful”

She squeezed his hand, and turned to the window.

She stood there watching his black figure cross the road in the sunshine, and pass round the corner by the railings of the church.  He walked quickly, very upright; there was something unseeing even about that back view of him; or was it that he saw-another world?  She had never lost the mental habits of her orthodox girlhood, and in spite of all impatience, recognised his sanctity.  When he had disappeared she went into her bedroom.  What he had said, indeed, was no discovery.  She had known.  Oh!  She had known.  ’Why didn’t I accept Jimmy’s offer?  Why didn’t I marry him?  Is it too late?’ she thought.  ’Could I?  Would he—­even now?’ But then she started away from her own thought.  Marry him! knowing his heart was with this girl?

She looked long at her face in the mirror, studying with a fearful interest the little hard lines and markings there beneath their light coating of powder.  She examined the cunning touches of colouring matter here and there in her front hair.  Were they cunning enough?  Did they deceive?  They seemed to her suddenly to stare out.  She fingered and smoothed the slight looseness and fulness of the skin below her chin.  She stretched herself, and passed her hands down over her whole form, searching as it were for slackness, or thickness.  And she had the bitter thought:  ‘I’m all out.  I’m doing all I can.’  The lines of a little poem Fort had showed her went thrumming through her head: 

“Time, you old gipsy man
Will you not stay
Put up your caravan
Just for a day?”

What more could she do?  He did not like to see her lips reddened.  She had marked his disapprovals, watched him wipe his mouth after a kiss, when he thought she couldn’t see him.  ‘I need’nt!’ she thought.  ’Noel’s lips are no redder, really.  What has she better than I?  Youth—­dew on the grass!’ That didn’t last long!  But long enough to “do her in” as her soldier-men would say.  And, suddenly she revolted against herself, against Fort, against this chilled and foggy country; felt a fierce nostalgia for African sun, and the African flowers; the happy-go-lucky,