“Yes,” I said to Verrall, making these discoveries quietly, “yes, Verrall, you have a good voice.  Queer I never thought of that before!”

We sat silently for a time before our vivisected passions.

“Gods!” I cried, “and there was our poor little top-hamper of intelligence on all these waves of instinct and wordless desire, these foaming things of touch and sight and feeling, like—­like a coop of hens washed overboard and clucking amidst the seas.”

Verrall laughed approval of the image I had struck out.  “A week ago,” he said, trying it further, “we were clinging to our chicken coops and going with the heave and pour.  That was true enough a week ago.  But to-day------?”

“To-day,” I said, “the wind has fallen.  The world storm is over.  And each chicken coop has changed by a miracle to a vessel that makes head against the sea.”

Section 4

“What are we to do?” asked Verrall.

Nettie drew a deep crimson carnation from the bowl before us, and began very neatly and deliberately to turn down the sepals of its calyx and remove, one by one, its petals.  I remember that went on through all our talk.  She put those ragged crimson shreds in a long row and adjusted them and readjusted them.  When at last I was alone with these vestiges the pattern was still incomplete.

“Well,” said I, “the matter seems fairly simple.  You two”—­I swallowed it—­“love one another.”

I paused.  They answered me by silence, by a thoughtful silence.

“You belong to each other.  I have thought it over and looked at it from many points of view.  I happened to want—­impossible things. . . .  I behaved badly.  I had no right to pursue you.”  I turned to Verrall.  “You hold yourself bound to her?”

He nodded assent.

“No social influence, no fading out of all this generous clearness in the air—­for that might happen—­will change you back . . . ?”

He answered me with honest eyes meeting mine, “No, Leadford, no!”

“I did not know you,” I said.  “I thought of you as something very different from this.”

“I was,” he interpolated.

“Now,” I said, “it is all changed.”

Then I halted—­for my thread had slipped away from me.

“As for me,” I went on, and glanced at Nettie’s downcast face, and then sat forward with my eyes upon the flowers between us, “since I am swayed and shall be swayed by an affection for Nettie, since that affection is rich with the seeds of desire, since to see her yours and wholly yours is not to be endured by me—­I must turn about and go from you; you must avoid me and I you. . . .  We must divide the world like Jacob and Esau. . . .  I must direct myself with all the will I have to other things.  After all—­this passion is not life!  It is perhaps for brutes and savages, but for men.  No!  We must part and I must forget.  What else is there but that?”