And yet I wasn't on her side. I didn't agree with her. I hardly knew how much I disagreed until I began to talk about it. I remember how, as I talked, the blazing edge of the shadow crept towards us till we were in full sunlight--so hot that we had to move back. And over in another garden not far away there sounded the sharp plick-plock of crocquet-balls--delicious, enchanting accompaniment. She might or might not leave Geoffrey, I began; that was, in a sense, her own affair. But the question of Terry was different--it was my affair, anybody's affair, as much as hers. Did she, I asked her plainly, think she was going to run straightway from Geoffrey to Terry? She said: "Perhaps not straightway. But sooner or later--of course." "It will just be a matter of guiding your relationship out of the Platonic paths into something more--intense?" "Put it that way if you like." "Of course you've been very clever. You've disguised your intentions very successfully--I'm sure he hasn't the slightest suspicion of them." "I hope not." I told her then the truth as I saw it. I was speaking, I urged her to believe, not as a moralist, but as a plain critic of circumstances.... She could leave Geoffrey, but--and I was quite ruthlessly frank about it--Terry would never have her. Terry, I went on, would never and _could_ never be happy with the wife of another man. There was something in his make-up--conscience (if she liked the word)--which would always intervene. And when that other man was his friend and benefactor the idea became absolutely impossible and unthinkable. Then, too, there was another point. If she left Geoffrey she would destroy the idea of her that was in Terry's mind--an idea that satisfied him more, perhaps, than any other idea of her that he had ever had. "You've been a hypocrite with him," I told her. "You've made him think that you and Geoffrey are perfectly happy, that all you care about is Geoffrey's happiness with you, and that the past is just a blank. Only the other day he told me how wonderful he thought it was that you and he could be such friends again--such _friends_, mind.... It's your only real chance--to go on acting the part you've made for yourself. If you don't--if you leave Geoffrey--I think I know what Terry will do. He'll just drop you--suddenly--without a word--as if you'd done something utterly and hopelessly caddish. It might cost him something to do it; it might shatter his faith in human nature; it might and probably would wipe out all the recovery in mind he's made so far; but he'd do it--I'm positive he'd do it. There's something in him, as you say, that makes him the sort of man he is--and that something, which you and I know but can't describe, would make him do it." All she said was: "It wouldn't. I know him better than you. I have no fear of him." "You think he loves you?" "I don't know. Possibly. Probably.... But it would all come back so easily." "And what then? Do you think he would be happy?"