Charnock was alone in the empty patio. It was very quiet; the sunshine was a steady golden glow upon the tiled floor, upon the tiled walls; above in the square of blue there was no scarf of cloud. He stood in the quiet empty patio, and the touch of her fingers tingled again upon his breast. Again he saw her drop the flowers she had culled for Wilbraham down the cliff. Amongst his doubts and perplexities those two recollections shone. They were accurate, indisputable. Her feverish vivacity, her coquetries, her friendliness to Wilbraham, her silence towards himself, the basket of flowers for Gibraltar--these things were puzzles. But twice that afternoon she had been true to herself, and each time she had betrayed the reality of her trouble and the reality of her need. It was very still in the patio. A bee droned amongst the tamarisks. It seemed to Charnock that, after much sojourning in outlandish corners of the earth, he who had foreseen his life as a struggle with the brutality of inanimate things was, after all, here in the still noonday, within these four walls, to undergo the crisis of his destiny. He gently turned the handle of the door and entered the room. CHAPTER XIV MIRANDA PROFESSES REGRET FOR A PRACTICAL JOKE He closed the door behind him. Miranda had neither seen nor heard him enter. She sat opposite to the door, on the other side of the round oak table, her arms stretched out upon the table, her face buried in her arms. She was not weeping, and Charnock might have believed from the abandonment of her attitude that she lay in a swoon, but for one movement that she made. Her outstretched hands were clasped together and her fingers perpetually worked, twisting and intertwisting. There was no sound whatever in the room beyond the ticking of a clock, and Charnock leaned against the door and found the silence horrible. He would have preferred it to have been broken if only by the sound of her tears. All his doubts, all his accusations, were swept clean out of his brain by the sight of her distress, and, tortured himself, he stood witness of her torture. He advanced to the table, and leaning over it took the woman's clasped hands into his. "Miranda!" he whispered, and again, "Miranda!" and there was just the same tenderness in his voice, as when he had first pronounced the name in the balcony over St. James's Park. Miranda did not lift her head, but her hands answered the clasp of his. She did not in truth know at that moment who was speaking to her. She was only sensible of the sympathy of his touch and the great comfort of his voice. Charnock bent lower towards her. "I love you," he said, "you--Miranda." Then she raised her face and stared at him with uncomprehending eyes. "I love you," he repeated. She looked down towards her hands which he still held and suddenly she shivered. "I love you," he said a third time.