Richard had gone up into his own flat and left her to wash and dress and explore. He had told her she was to have Tiedeman's flat. Not knowing who Tiedeman was made it more wonderful that God should have put it into his head to go away for Easter and lend you his flat.

If you wanted anything you could ring and they would come up from the basement and look after you.

She didn't want them to come up yet. She wanted to lie back among her cushions where Richard had packed her, and turn over the moments and remember what they had been like: getting out of the train at King's Cross and finding Richard there; coming with him out of the thin white April light into the rich darkness and brilliant colours of the room; the feeling of Richard's hands as they undid her fur stole and peeled the sleeves of her coat from her arms; seeing him kneel on the hearthrug and make tea with an air of doing something intensely interesting, an air of security and possession. He went about in Tiedeman's rooms as if they belonged to him.

She liked Tiedeman's flat: the big outer room, curtained with thick gentian blue and thin violet. There was a bowl of crimson and purple anemones on the dark oval of the oak table.

Tiedeman's books covered the walls with their coloured bands and stripes and the illuminated gold of their tooling. The deep bookcases made a ledge all round half-way up the wall, and the shallow bookcases went on above it to the ceiling.

But—those white books on the table were Richard's books. Mary Olivier—Mary Olivier. My books that I gave him…. They're Richard's rooms.

She got up and looked about. That long dark thing was her coat and fur stretched out on the flat couch in the corner where Richard had laid them; stretched out in an absolute peace and rest.

She picked them up and went into the inner room that showed through the wide square opening. The small brown oak-panelled room. No furniture but Richard's writing table and his chair. A tall narrow French window looking to the backs of houses, and opening on a leaded balcony. Spindle-wood trees, green balls held up on ramrod stems in green tubs. Richard's garden.

Curtains of thin silk, brilliant magenta, letting the light through. The hanging green bough of a plane tree, high up on the pane, between. A worn magentaish rug on the dark floor.

She went through the door on the right and found a short, narrow passage. Another French window opening from it on to the balcony. A bathroom on the other side; a small white panelled bedroom at the end.

She had no new gown. Nothing but the black chiffon one (black because of Uncle Victor) she had bought two years ago with Richard's cheque. She had worn it at Greffington that evening when she dined with him. It had a long, pointed train. Its thin, open, wide spreading sleeves fell from her shoulders in long pointed wings. It made her feel slender.

* * * * *

There was no light in the inner room. Clear glassy dark twilight behind the tall window. She stood there waiting for Richard to come down.

Richard loved all this. He loved beautiful books, beautiful things, beautiful anemone colours, red and purple with the light coming through them, thin silk curtains that let the light through like the thin silky tissues of flowers. He loved the sooty brown London walls, houses standing back to back, the dark flanks of the back wings jutting out, almost meeting across the trenches of the gardens, making the colours in his rooms brilliant as stained glass.

He loved the sound of the street outside, intensifying the quiet of the house.

It was the backs that were so beautiful at night; the long straight ranges of the dark walls, the sudden high dark cliffs and peaks of the walls, hollowed out into long galleries filled with thick, burning light, rows on rows of oblong casements opening into the light. Here and there a tree stood up black in the trenches of the gardens.

The tight strain in her mind loosened and melted in the stream of the pure new light, the pure new darkness, the pure new colours.

Richard came in. They stood together a long time, looking out; they didn't say a word.

Then, as they turned back to the lighted outer room, "I thought I was to have had Tiedeman's flat?"

"Well, he's up another flight of stairs and the rain makes a row on the skylight. It was simpler to take his and give you mine. I want you to have mine."

II.

She turned off the electric light and shut her eyes and lay thinking. The violent motion of the express prolonged itself in a ghostly vibration, rocking the bed. In still space, unshaken by this tremor, she could see the other rooms, the quiet, beautiful rooms.

I wonder how Mamma and Dorsy are getting on…. I'm not going to think about Mamma. It isn't fair to Richard. I shan't think about anybody but Richard for this fortnight. One evening of it's gone already. It might have lasted quite another hour if he hadn't got up and gone away so suddenly. What a fool I was to let him think I was tired.

There will be thirteen evenings more. Thirteen. You can stretch time out by doing a lot of things in it; doing something different every hour. When you're with Richard every minute's different from the last, and he brings you the next all bright and new.

Heaven would be like that. Imagine an eternity of heaven; being with Richard for ever and ever. But nobody ever did imagine an eternity of heaven. People only talk about it because they can't imagine it. What they mean is that if they had one minute of it they would remember that for ever and ever.

* * * * *

This is Richard's life. This is what I'd have taken from him if I'd let him marry me.

I daren't even think what it would have been like if I'd tried to mix up Mamma and Richard in the same house…. And poor little Mamma in a strange place with nothing about it that she could remember, going up and down in it, trying to get at me, and looking reproachful and disapproving all the time. She'd have to be shut in her own rooms because Richard wouldn't have her in his. Sitting up waiting to be read aloud to and played halma with when Richard wanted me. Saying the same things over and over again. Sighing.

Richard would go off his head if he heard Mamma sigh.

He wants to be by himself the whole time, "working like blazes." He likes to feel that the very servants are battened down in the basement so that he doesn't know they're there. He couldn't stand Tiedeman and Peters if they weren't doing the same thing. Tiedeman working like blazes in the flat above him and Peters working like blazes in the flat below.

Richard slept in this room last night. He will sleep in it again when I'm gone.

She switched the light on to look at it for another second: the privet-white panelled cabin, the small wine-coloured chest of drawers, the small golden-brown wardrobe, shining.

My hat's in that wardrobe, lying on Richard's waistcoat, fast asleep.

If Tiedeman's flat's up there, that's Richard walking up and down over my head…. If it rains there'll be a row on the skylight and he won't sleep. He isn't sleeping now.

III.

It would be much nicer to walk home through Kensington Gardens and Hyde
Park.

She was glad that they were going to have a quiet evening. After three evenings at the play and Richard ruining himself in hansoms and not sleeping…. After this unbelievable afternoon. All those people, those terribly important people.

It was amusing to go about with Richard and feel important yourself because you were with him. And to see Richard's ways with them, his nice way of behaving as if he wasn't important in the least, as if it was you they had made all that fuss about.

To think that the little dried up schoolmasterish man was Professor Lee Ramsden, prowling about outside the group, eager and shy, waiting to be introduced to you, nobody taking the smallest notice of him. The woman who had brought him making soft, sentimental eyes at you through the gaps in the group, and trying to push him in a bit nearer. Then Richard asking you to be kind for one minute to the poor old thing. It hurt you to see him shy and humble and out of it.

And when you thought of his arrogance at Durlingham.

It was the women's voices that tired you so, and their nervous, snapping eyes.

The best of all was going away from them quietly with Richard into
Kensington Gardens.

"Did you like it, Mary?"

"Frightfully. But not half so much as this."

IV.

She was all alone in the front room, stretched out on the flat couch in the corner facing the door.

He was still writing his letter in the inner room. When she heard him move she would slide her feet to the floor and sit up.

She wanted to lie still with her hands over her shut eyes, making the four long, delicious days begin again and go on in her head.

Richard would take hansoms. You couldn't stop him. Perhaps he was afraid if you walked too far you would drop down dead. When it was all over your soul would still drive about London in a hansom for ever and ever, through blue and gold rain-sprinkled days, through poignant white evenings, through the streaming, steep, brown-purple darkness and the streaming flat, thin gold of the wet nights.

They were not going to have any more tiring parties. There wasn't enough time.

When she opened her eyes he was sitting on the chair by the foot of the couch, leaning forward, looking at her. She saw nothing but his loose, hanging hands and straining eyes.

"Oh, Richard—what time is it?" She swung her feet to the floor and sat up suddenly.

"Only nine."

"Only nine. The evening's nearly gone."

* * * * *

"Is that why you aren't sleeping, Richard? … I didn't know. I didn't know I was hurting you."

"What-did-you-think? What-did-you-think? Isn't it hurting you?"

"Me? I've got used to it. I was so happy just being with you."

"So happy and so quiet that I thought you didn't care…. Well, what was
I to think? If you won't marry me."

"That's because I care so frightfully. Don't let's rake that up again."

"Well, there it is."

She thought: "I've no business to come here to his rooms, turning him out, making him so wretched that he can't sleep. No business…. Unless—"

"And we've got to go on living with it," he said.

He thinks I haven't the courage … I can't tell him.

"Yes," she said, "there it is."

Why shouldn't I tell him? … We've only ten days. As long as I'm here nothing matters but Richard … If I keep perfectly still, still like this, if I don't say a word he'll think of it….

"Richard—would you rather I hadn't come?"

"No."

"You remember the evening I came—you got up so suddenly and left me?
What did you do that for?"

"Because if I'd stayed another minute I couldn't have left you at all."

He stood up.

"And you're only going now because you can't see that I'm not a coward."

* * * * *

This wouldn't last, the leaping and knocking of her heart, the eyelids screwing themselves tight, the jerking of her nerves at every sound: at the two harsh rattling screams of the curtain rings along the pole, at the light click of the switches. Only the small green-shaded lamp still burning on Richard's writing table in the inner room. She could hear him moving about, softly and secretly, in there.

He was Richard. That was Richard, moving about in there.

V.

Richard thought his flat was a safe place. But it wasn't. People creeping up the stairs every minute and standing still to listen. People would come and try the handle of the door.

"They won't, dear. Nobody ever comes in. It has never happened. It isn't going to happen now."

Yet you couldn't help thinking that just this night it would happen.

She thought that Peters knew. He wouldn't come out of his door till you had turned the corner of the stairs.

She thought the woman in the basement knew. She remembered the evening at Greffington: Baxter's pinched mouth and his eyes sliding sideways to look at you. She knew now what Baxter had been thinking. The woman's look was the female of Baxter's.

As if that could hurt you!

VI.

"Mary, do you know you're growing younger every minute?"

"I shall go on growing younger and younger till it's all over."

"Till what's all over?"

"This. So will you, Richard."

"Not in the same way. My hair isn't young any more. My face isn't young any more."

"I don't want it to be young. It wasn't half so nice a face when it was young…. Some other woman loved it when it was young."

"Yes. Another woman loved it when it was young."

"Is she alive and going about?"

"Oh, yes; she's alive and she goes about a lot."

"Does she love you now?"

"I suppose she does."

"I wish she didn't."

"You needn't mind her, Mary. She was never anything to me. She never will be."

"But I do mind her. I mind her awfully. I can't bear to think of her going about and loving you. She's no business to…. Why do I mind her loving you more than I'd mind your loving her?"

"Because you like loving more than being loved."

"How do you know?"

"I know every time I hold you in my arms."

There have been other women then, or he wouldn't know the difference.
There must have been a woman that he loved.

I don't care. It wasn't the same thing.

"What are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking nothing was ever the same thing as this."

"No…. Whatever we do, Mary, we mustn't go back on it…. If we could have done anything else. But I can't see…. It's not as if it could last long. Nothing lasts long. Life doesn't last long."

He sounded as if he were sorry, as if already, in his mind, he had gone back on it. After three days.

"You're not sorry, Richard?"

"Only when I think of you. The awful risks I've made you take."

"Can't you see I like risks? I always have liked risks. When we were children my brothers and I were always trying to see just how near we could go to breaking our necks."

"I know you've courage enough for anything. But that was rather a different sort of risk."

"No. No. There are no different sorts of risk. All intense moments of
danger are the same. It's always the same feeling. I don't know whether
I've courage or not, but I do know that when danger comes you don't care.
You're hoisted up above caring."

"You do care, Mary."

"About my 'reputation '? You wouldn't like to think I didn't care about it…. Of course, I care frightfully. If I didn't, where's the risk?"

"I hate your having to take it all. I don't risk anything."

"I wish you did. Then you'd be happier. Poor Richard—so safe in his man's world…. You can be sorry about that, if you like. But not about me. I shall never be sorry. Nothing in this world can make me sorry…. I shouldn't like Mamma to know about it. But even Mamma couldn't make me sorry…. I've always been happy about the things that matter, the real things. I hate people who sneak and snivel about real things…. People who have doubts about God and don't like them and snivel. I had doubts about God once, and they made me so happy I could hardly bear it…. Mamma couldn't bear it making me happy. She wouldn't have minded half so much if I had been sorry and snivelled. She wouldn't mind so much if I was sorry and snivelled about this."

"You said you weren't going to think about your mother."

"I'm not thinking about her. I'm thinking about how happy I have been and am and shall be."

Even thinking about Mamma couldn't hurt you now. Nothing could hurt the happiness you shared with Richard. What it was now it would always be. Pure and remorseless.

VII.

Delicious, warm, shining day. She had her coat and hat on ready to go down with him. The hansom stood waiting in the street.

They were looking up the place on the map, when the loud double knock came.

"That's for Peters. He's always getting wires—"

"If we don't go to-day we shall never go. We've only got five more now."

The long, soft rapping on the door of the room. Knuckles rapping out their warning. "You can't say I don't give you time."

Richard took the orange envelope.

"It's for you, Mary."

"Oh, Richard, 'Come at once. Mother ill.—DORSY.'"

She would catch the ten train. That was what the hansom was there for.

"I'll send your things on after you."

The driver and the slog-slogging horse knew that she would catch the train. Richard knew.

He had the same look on his face that was there before when Mamma was ill. Sorrow that wasn't sorrow. And the same clear thought behind it.