"But you!" Valentine Wannop exclaimed. "_You_! what will _you_ do! After the war!" "I!" he said rather bewilderedly. "I! . . . Oh, I shall go into the old furniture business. I've been offered a job. . . ." She didn't believe he was serious. He hadn't, she knew, ever thought about his future. But suddenly she had a vision of his white head and pale face in the back glooms of a shop full of dusty things. He would come out, get heavily on to a dusty bicycle and ride off to a cottage sale. She cried out: "Why don't you do it at once? Why don't you take the job at once?" for in the back of the dark shop he would at least be safe. He said: "Oh, no! Not at this time! Besides the old furniture trade's probably not itself for the minute. . . ." He was obviously thinking of something else. "I've probably been a low cad," he said, "wringing your heart with my doubts. But I wanted to see where our similarities come in. We've always been--or we've seemed always to me--so alike in our thoughts. I daresay I wanted you to respect me. . . ." "Oh, I respect you! I respect you!" she said. "You're as innocent as a child." He went on: "And I wanted to get some thinking done. It hasn't been often of late that one has had a quiet room and a fire and . . . you! To think in front of. You _do_ make one collect one's thoughts. I've been very muddled till to-day . . . till five minutes ago! Do you remember our drive? You analysed my character. I'd never have let another soul. . . But you see . . . Don't you see?" She said: "No! What am I to see? I remember . . ." He said: "That I'm certainly not an English country gentleman now; picking up the gossip of the horse markets and saying: let the country go to hell, for me!" She said: "Did I say that? . . . Yes, I said that!" The deep waves of emotion came over her: she trembled. She stretched out her arms. . . . She thought she stretched out her arms. He was hardly visible in the firelight. But she could see nothing: she was blind for tears. She could hardly be stretching out her arms, for she had both hands to her handkerchief on her eyes. He said something: it was no word of love or she would have held it; it began with: "Well, I must be . . ." He was silent for a long time: she imagined herself to feel great waves coming from him to her. But he wasn't in the room. . . .