He came back to Loman Cottage at about six o’clock that evening and Mrs. Fazackerly overtook him just as he pushed open the garden gate. She had begun a reference to the all-pervading theatricals when she caught sight of his face. The curiously boyish aspect that always belonged to it seemed intensified, but she has told me that, although she felt he was suffering, it wasn’t the fierce, unreasoning suffering of youth that he suggested to her, but rather a certain perplexity, a foreseeing of conflict. “What is it?” she cried, almost involuntarily. “Can’t you tell me? Can’t I do anything?” “How kind you are,” Bill said gratefully. He looked at her for a minute or two in silence. “We needn’t go indoors yet. Let’s sit out here for a minute.” They sat under the pink may tree on Nancy’s circular seat. “Have you been down to Queen Street?” at last said Mrs. Fazackerly. “Yes. You know he’s come. Harter’s come.” “Has he?” “Do you remember that I told you a little time ago she--Diamond--had written to him and asked him to come?” “Yes.” “In her letter she told him.” “Told him?” Nancy understood really what he meant, but it still seemed to her so extraordinary that she could almost have persuaded herself that she didn’t understand. “Told him?” she repeated. “About us,” said Bill, simply. “That she and I love one another.” When Nancy Fazackerly told me this, which she did long afterwards, I said it was impossible. Men--at any rate Englishmen--don’t say these things. But Nancy only repeated that Bill _had_ said them, and had said them in a way that was absolutely natural, so that she had not been surprised at the time--only afterwards. “You do understand, don’t you?” Bill said. “Her marriage to Harter was a mistake. He hasn’t been happy either. And, of course, one can imagine how rotten it is for two people to remain together when they’ve come to dislike one another and when, anyway, they never had a great deal in common to begin with.” “Why did they marry then?” murmured Nancy; not censoriously, as Lady Annabel might have said it, but as one sorrowfully propounding for the hundredth time an insoluble problem. “Well, you know, if you think of the way most people are brought up, it isn’t surprising there are so many unhappy marriages,” Bill remarked. “Until quite lately, women weren’t told more than half the truth about marriage, were they? And anyway--it isn’t talked about as a serious thing now, is it? People make a sort of furtive joke of it ... _le mariage n’est pas l’amour_, and that sort of thing.... And it ought to be quite different. It ought to have a different place in the scale of relative values. As it is, of course, most people don’t even know what they’re missing, because they haven’t been educated up to wanting it. But Diamond does know, you see.” “Did she always, do you suppose?” “More or less. She knew underneath, I think, but she wouldn’t let herself face it.” “And if she hadn’t met you?”