All right. I’ll wash up ... loathsome job! That kettle always took so long to boil—we ought to have a flat-bottomed one like the one they use for picnics at the Waters’. It’s a good thing I’m able to think so composedly of them. Doesn’t it show, after all, that—what I told his mother, what I thought I should have to hold away from myself so determinedly, may not really be true ... may not, anyhow, be the deep and lasting sort of “true” that I imagined? Just a fancy, a passing, summer-holiday attraction for someone who’ll never guess. It must—it _shall_ be that. No harm in remembering him—all of them. Let’s see. To-day was to be their excursion to Red Wharf Bay. I can see the whole party—and their jolly, sun-browned faces against the throbbing blue of sea and sky. Odette Charrier will be like some bright foreign bird just alighted amid the homely gold of the Welsh gorse ... prattling away in her pretty broken English that I believe she sometimes breaks on purpose to hear Billy Waters’ amused, boyish laugh. They’ll be together all the time to-day—no official _fiancée_ to intervene with even the shadow of a claim.... Together they’ll be unpacking the picnic basket, hunting for the corkscrew, picking up big, sun-warmed pebbles from the beach to lay at the corners of the white picnic cloth to keep it from flying into the sea. The others will be—oh, somewhere about.... Those two will stroll off after lunch, I suppose. I wonder if they’ll bathe? _He_ wouldn’t have lost his nerve even after that afternoon swim.... _Only yesterday?_ They’ll bathe from the rocks, I expect. And I might still have been there.... A ring at the door of the flat. Milk, Mrs. Skinner, or—what? I’d better go and see.... * * * * * They call _us_ the unexpected sex, of whom no man can ever say what we shall be at next. What about themselves? Only last evening I’d left him standing, stiff with astonishment, on the Holyhead platform. This morning here he was again, blocking up the tiny entrance to our flat—my official _fiancé_! CHAPTER XXVII PARTING COMPANY Thank heaven for the instinct that silenced the welcoming “Billy!” before it broke from my lips. Thank heaven also for that numbness all over me that allowed me to say in a voice as detached as if it had been the piano-tuner to whom I’d just opened the door, “Oh! good morning.” “Good morning.” A tone as blank as a whitewashed wall between him and me. “I suppose you are surprised to see me.” “Well, I—yes, I am, of course.” “You didn’t expect me.” “No.” We both glanced down at my sleeves, still rolled up from the kitchen. “I have something to say to you,” he went on in that same tone. His face I couldn’t see in that little, dark drainpipe of a passage where we stood. “That’s why I came.” “Oh!” What could it be that brought him an eight hours’ journey on my track? Surely not that foolish old out-of-date apology still—or those unwanted thanks for saving his life.