“For the first time in our lives we’re together alone within four walls. You and I. Isn’t it strange? We have to talk. Not only now, but often. As often as we can. It would have been monstrous of me to expect you to run up and down to London. Besides, there would have been no privacy. The lounges of the great hotels—I loathe them! A man and woman sit whispering in a corner and at once surround themselves with an atmosphere of intrigue. Horrible! And I couldn’t come every day to Churton Towers—even ostensibly to see Godfrey. There would have been the devil to pay. All sorts of scandal. So I’ve made this my headquarters, in order to be near you.” The weather had turned raw and cold, and as she had driven in an open car, clad in light coat and skirt, with nothing to warm her but a fur stole, she felt chilly, and welcomed the bright fire in the grate. She smiled, and said it was very cosy. He searched the room for a hassock, and finding one set it beneath her feet. “We’ll have tea soon, which will make it cosier,” he said. He threw himself into an arm-chair on the other side of the fire. “It’s like a fairy-tale, isn’t it?” She admitted the strangeness of the circumstances in which they had met, and with instinct of self-defence began to speak of Godfrey, of their suddenly formed friendship, of his manifold excellences. Baltazar let her run on for a while, content merely to let his eyes rest on her and to listen to her voice. At last he rose, irrelevantly, and, striding across to her, held out both his hands. She could not choose but surrender hers. “Can’t you realize what you’ve been to me? ‘All a wonder and a wild desire!’” She fluttered a frightened glance at him and withdrew her hands. He stood looking down on her, one elbow resting on the mantelpiece. “Do you remember? That Browning line—it was one of the last things I said to you. Then we lost our heads and broke off a delightful conversation. Why not continue it, starting from where we left off?” “How can we go back twenty years?” “By wiping out two hundred and forty unimportant months from our memories.” She glanced up at him and shook her head. It was the grey and barren waste of those two hundred and forty months that formed the impassable barrier. In order to pick up the thread of that last talk it would be necessary to recapture the grace of those brief and exquisite moments. “If we are to be friends,” she said, “we must start afresh. All that—that foolishness has been dead and buried long ago.” “Buried, perhaps—or, rather, hidden away in a Sleeping Beauty sort of trance. But dead? Not a bit of it. It has been healthily alive all the time, and now—a magic touch—and it has reawakened strong and beautiful as ever.”