Her mouth twitched.  The intense irony in the last word made her feel inclined to laugh hysterically.

“But you don’t always behave in such a way as to make me feel loyal,” she said, controlling herself.

“I’m going to try to be more clever with you in the future.”

She got up abruptly.

“I didn’t expect you quite so early, and I’ve got a letter to write to Jimmy—­”

“And a letter to your lawyer!” he interrupted.

“No, that can wait till to-morrow.  I must think things over.  But I must write to Jimmy now.”

“Give him a kind message from me.”

“What will you do while I am writing?”

“I’ll sit here.”

“But do something!  Why not read your letters?”

“Yes, I may as well look at them.  There was quite a collection waiting for me at the British Post Office.  I haven’t been there for months.”

“Why don’t you go more regularly?”

“Because I’ve done with the past!” he exclaimed, with sudden savagery.  “And letters from home only rake it up.”

She looked at him narrowly.

“But have we ever done with the past?” she said, with her eyes upon him.  “If we think so isn’t that a stupidity on our part?”

“You’re talking like a parson!”

“Even a parson may hit upon a truth now and then.”

“It depends upon oneself.  I say I have done with the past.”

“And yet you’re afraid to read letters from England.”

“I’m not.”

“And you never go to England.”

“There’s nothing to prevent me from going to England.”

“Except your own feelings about things.”

“One gets over feelings with the help of Time.  I’m not such a sensitive fool as I used to be.  Life has knocked all that sort of rot out of me.”

She sat down at the writing-table from which Jimmy’s photograph had vanished.

“Read your letters, or read a book,” she said.

And she picked up a pen.

She did not look at him again, and she tried hard to detach her mind from him.  She took a sheet of writing-paper, and began to write to Jimmy, but she was painfully aware of Dion’s presence in the room, of every slightest movement that he made.  She heard him sit down and move something on a table, then sigh; complete silence followed.  She felt as if her whole body were flushing with irritation.  Why didn’t he get his letters?  She was positive Beatrice had written to tell him that Rosamund had left the Sisterhood, and she was longing to know what effect that news would have upon him.

Presently he moved again and got up, and she heard him go over to the window.  She strove, with a bitter effort, to concentrate her thoughts on Jimmy, but now the Bedouin came between her and the paper; she saw him striding indifferently through the blaze of sunshine.

“About the summer holidays this year—­I am not quite sure yet what my plans will be——­” she wrote slowly.