"Perhaps I did wrong. I think perhaps I've done wrong in many ways during these last years. I am seeing many things for the first time. The truth is I have been so absorbed in my work that I've thought of nothing else. I took it too much for granted that you were happy because I was happy. And now I want to make it right. I do indeed, Amy. Tell me what's the matter." She said nothing. He waited for a long time. Her immobility always angered him. He said at last more impatiently. "Please tell me, Amy, what you have against me." "I have nothing against you." "Then why are things wrong between us?" "Are things wrong?" "You know they are--ever since that morning when you wouldn't come to Holy Communion." "I was tired that morning." "It is more than tiredness," he said, with sudden impatience, beating upon the counterpane with his fist. "Amy--you're not behaving fairly. You must talk to me. I insist on it." She turned once more towards him. "What is it you want me to say?" "Why you're unhappy." "But if I am not unhappy?" "You are." "But suppose I say that I am not?" "You are. You are. You are!" he shouted at her. "Very well, then, I am." "Why are you?" "Who _is_ happy really? At any rate for more than a moment. Only very thoughtless and silly people." "You're putting me off." He took her hand again. "I'm to blame, Amy--to blame in many ways. But people are talking." She snatched her hand away. "People talking? Who?...But as though that mattered." "It _does_ matter. It has gone far--much farther than I thought." She looked at him then, quickly, and turned her face away again. "Who's talking? And what are they saying?" "They are saying----" He broke off. What _were_ they saying? Until the arrival of that horrible letter he had not realised that they were saying anything at all. "Don't think for a single moment, Amy, that I pay the slightest attention to any of their talk. I would not have bothered you with any of this had it not been for something else--of which I'll speak in a moment. If everything is right between us--between you and me--then it doesn't matter if the whole world talks until it's blue in the face." "Leave it alone, then," she said. "Let them talk." Her indifference stung him. She didn't care, then, whether things were right between himself and her or no? It was the same to her. She cared so little for him.... That sudden realisation struck him so sharply that it was as though some one had hit him in the back. For so many years he had taken it for granted...taken something for granted that was not to be so taken. Very dimly some one was approaching him--that dark, misty, gigantic figure--blotting out the light from the windows. That figure was becoming day by day more closely his companion. Looking at her now more intently, and with a new urgency, he said: "Some one brought me a letter, Amy. They said it was a letter of yours."