‘If it is all in vain,’ he continued, ’then I shall say good-bye, and there’s an end.’

‘I hope not—­I should think—­’

Useless.  She set her lips and became mute.  If only he would leave her!  And almost immediately he did so, with a few words of kind tone.  She felt the pressure of his hand, and saw him walk rapidly away; doubtless he knew this was what she desired.

Until he had passed out of sight, Monica kept the same direction.  Then she turned round and hurried back, fearful lest the detention might make her late, and Bevis might lose hope of her coming.  There could be no one in the building now whom she need fear to meet.  She opened the big entrance door and went up.

Bevis must have been waiting for the sound of her light footstep; his door flew open before she could knock.  Without speaking, a silent laugh of joy upon his lips, he drew back to make room for her entrance, and then pressed both her hands.

In the sitting-room were beginnings of disorder.  Pictures had been taken down from the walls and light ornaments removed.

‘I shan’t sleep here after to-night,’ Bevis began, his agitation scarcely less obvious than Monica’s.  ’To-morrow I shall be packing what is to go with me.  How I hate it all!’

Monica dropped into a chair near the door.

‘Oh, not there!’ he exclaimed.  ’Here, where you sat before.  We are going to have tea together again.’

His utterances were forced, and the laugh that came between them betrayed the quivering of his nerves.

’Tell me what you have been doing.  I have thought of you day and night.’

He brought a chair close to her, and when he had seated himself he took one of her hands.  Monica, scarcely repressing a sob, the result of reaction from her fears and miseries, drew the hand away.  But again he took it.

‘There’s the glove on it,’ he said in a shaking voice.  ’What harm in my holding your glove?  Don’t think of it, and talk to me.  I love music, but no music is like your voice.’

‘You go on Monday?’

It was her lips spoke the sentence, not she.

‘No, on Tuesday—­I think.’

‘My—­Mr. Widdowson is going to take me away from London.’

‘Away?’

She told him the circumstances.  Bevis kept his eyes upon her face, with a look of rapt adoration which turned at length to pain and woeful perplexity.

‘You have been married a year,’ he murmured.  ’Oh, if I had met you before that!  What a cruel fate that we should know each other only when there was no hope!’

The man revealed himself in this dolorous sentimentality.  His wonted blitheness and facetiousness, his healthy features, his supple, well-built frame, suggested that when love awoke within him he would express it with virile force.  But he trembled and blushed like a young girl, and his accents fell at last into a melodious whining.