She did not answer for what seemed a long time. She was a soft darkness in the dark room, beside him. The night was a blue curtain over the windows, hung with stars like toys. He touched her, as though to prove to himself that he was not dreaming. He must be dreaming. But she was there, beside him, soft, warm: Lamoir, his wife. And the stars on the windows were as though at his finger-tips, but Lamoir was untouchable. She was untouchable, suddenly. She was most untouchable when he touched her. It seemed wrong to touch her. That made him angry. He laughed. “I’m damned,” he said, “if I understand what all this is about! I come home after months away, and you say good-bye!” “I don’t think,” she said, “that I can explain. Not now....” He laughed. She was going away, and she didn’t trouble to explain why! He wanted her to say: “Don’t be bitter, please!” But she was silent. She was beside him, yet her breath came from across the universe. And what on earth was it all about? “But do you mean you want to leave me?” he asked, astounded, angry. She said: “Yes.” “Lamoir!” She said: “I can’t bear it any longer, Hugh. I love you too much.” He repeated idiotically: “You love me too much?” Now she was standing, a shadow in the darkness, away from him, a million miles away from him. He was silent. All the inside of him went silent. Suddenly there were no words, no need for words, no Lamoir, no Hugh, nothing but the primal nothingness before Adam. He would not hold her for a moment if she wished to leave him. “You will understand,” she said. “You see, I want to be free to love you, and you won’t let me. You will understand that, too. God has given me no children, Hugh. He has given me only my love for you. That is all I have, and I have been sacrificing it to you for ten years; but now I am growing afraid for it, it’s become such a poor, beaten, wretched bit of a thing, and so I must leave you. I owe that to myself, dear--and to the you inside you.” And he said, despite himself, that he loved her. What was so strange was that, suddenly, he had ceased to feel like her husband, suddenly it seemed to him inconceivable that he had possessed her countless times. Inconceivable that he and she had been one, when now they were so apart! It had seemed so easy then to touch her--now, not a lifetime would surmount the barriers she had raised between them. He suddenly thought: “Good Lord, how lucky I’ve been in the past--and I never knew it!” He was going to touch her, when like a blow on the face he realised that to touch her would be indecent. She was not his wife. Suddenly, absurdly, he thought of Soames Forsyte, of John Galsworthy. Hugh had always disliked Galsworthy for his creation of Forsyte, a man who could rape his wife. Lamoir said suddenly: “There will be another chance later on....” He leapt at that. “Later on? Lamoir, you mean you will come back?” “No,” she said. “I didn’t mean that. I shall never come back.”