She must have known me yesterday when she asked me to go and see what Papa was doing. As for "waiting," he may have to wait years and years. And I'm forty-five now. IV. The round black eye of the mirror looked at them. Their figures would be there, hers and Richard's, at the bottom of the black crystal bowl, small like the figures in the wrong end of a telescope, very clear in the deep, clear swirl of the glass. They were sitting close together on the old rose-chintz-covered couch. _Her_ couch. You could see him putting the cushions at her back, tucking the wide Victorian skirt in close about the feet in the black velvet slippers. And she would lie there with her poor hands folded in the white cashmere shawl. Richard knew what you were thinking. "You can't expect me," he was saying, "to behave like my uncle.... Besides, it's a little too late, isn't it?... We said, whatever we did we wouldn't go back on it. If it wasn't wrong then, Mary, it isn't wrong now." "It isn't that, Richard." (No. Not that. Pure and remorseless then. Pure and remorseless now.) She wondered whether he had heard it. The crunching on the gravel walk under the windows, stopping suddenly when the feet stepped on to the grass. And the hushed growl of the men's voices. Baxter and the gardener. They had come to see whether the light would go out again behind the yellow blinds as it had gone out last night. If you were a coward; if you had wanted to get off scot-free, it was too late. Richard knows I'm not a coward. Funk wouldn't keep me from him. It isn't _that_. "What is it, then?" "Can't you see, can't you feel that it's no use coming again, just for this? It'll never be what it was then. It'll always be like last night, and you'll think I don't care. Something's holding me back from you. Something that's happened to me. I don't know yet what it is." "Nerves. Nothing but nerves." "No. I thought it was nerves last night. I thought it was this room. Those two poor ghosts, looking at us. I even thought it might be Mark and Roddy--all of them--tugging at me to get me away from you.... But it isn't that. It's something in me." "You're trying to tell me you don't want me." "I'm trying to tell you what happened. I did want you, all last year. It was so awful that I had to stop it. You couldn't go on living like that.... I willed and willed not to want you." "So did I. All the willing in the world couldn't stop me." "It isn't that sort of willing. You might go on all your life like that and nothing would happen. You have to find it out for yourself; and even that might take you all your life.... It isn't the thing people call willing at all. It's much queerer. Awfully queer." "How--_queer_?" "Oh--the sort of queerness you don't like talking about." "I'm sorry, Mary. You seem to be talking about something, but I haven't the faintest notion what it is. But you can make yourself believe anything you like if you keep on long enough."