Since the one occasion that has been related, Vi had not mentioned her husband. Whether he was still urging her to return, or had extended her respite, or was on his way to fetch her, I had no means of guessing. I lived in a secret delirium of exalted happiness and torturing foreboding. Each day as it ended was tragic with farewell. The hour was coming when I must return to Oxford and when she must return to America. Soon we should have nothing but memories. However well we might disguise our motives for dawdling in Ransby, it could not be long before their hollowness would be detected. Already Sir Charles had ceased to serve me as an excuse; I had not seen him since my departure from Woadley. The very suavity of our interchanged courtesies and unsatisfying pretense of frank friendship gave edge to my yearning. I had come at last to the breaking-point. I did not know it. I still told myself that we were both too honorable to step aside: that we had too much to lose by it; that I loved her too dearly to let her be anything to me unless she could be my wife. The casuistry of this attitude was patent. As my hunger increased I grew more daring. No thoughts that were not of her could find room in my mind. I had lost my interest in books--they were mere reports on the thing I was enduring. Nature was only my experience made external on a lower physical plane. My imagination swept me on to depths and heights which once would have terrified. I grew accustomed to picturing myself as the hero of situations which I had formerly studied with puzzled amazement in other men’s lives. The face of Lottie, encountered daily in the gray streets of Ransby, which had at first restrained me by reminding me of sin’s ultimate ugliness, ceased to warn me. When Ruthita made the suggestion that we should go for our walk alone together, I had expected a prompt refusal from Vi. She rose from the disordered tea-table and walked over to the window, turning her back on us. I could see by the poise of her head that she was gazing down the gardens, across the denes to the wreck, where everything important had taken place. I could guess the memories that were in her mind. From where I sat I could see her head, framed in the window against the slate-colored expanse of water, the curved edge of the horizon, and the orange-tinted sky. Creeping across the panes under full sail came a fleet of fishing smacks, losing themselves one by one as they advanced into the tangled amber of her hair. I counted them, telling myself that she would speak when the foremost had re-appeared on the other side. Then it occurred to me that she was waiting for me to urge her. “Mrs. Carpenter,” I said casually, “won’t you come? It’s going to be a jolly evening. We can go by way of St. Margaret’s Church to the Broads and watch the sunset.” Without moving her body, she commenced to drum with her fingers on the panes.