Her eyes dilated suddenly, and as suddenly closed again. She said nothing. I grew conscious of unbearable pain, the pain of returning life. She was going away. I should be alone. The future began to exist again, looming up like a vessel through thick mist, silent, phantasmal, overwhelming--a hideous future of irremediable remorse, of solitude, of craving. "You are going back to work with Churchill," she said suddenly. "How did you know?" I asked breathlessly. My despair of a sort found vent in violent interjecting of an immaterial query. "You leave your letters about," she said, "and.... It will be best for you." "It will not," I said bitterly. "It could never be the same. I don't want to see Churchill. I want...." "You want?" she asked, in a low monotone. "You," I answered. She spoke at last, very slowly: "Oh, as for me, I am going to marry Gurnard." I don't know just what I said then, but I remember that I found myself repeating over and over again, the phrases running metrically up and down my mind: "You couldn't marry Gurnard; you don't know what he is. You couldn't marry Gurnard; you don't know what he is." I don't suppose that I knew anything to the discredit of Gurnard--but he struck me in that way at that moment; struck me convincingly--more than any array of facts could have done. "Oh--as for what he is--" she said, and paused. "_I_ know...." and then suddenly she began to speak very fast. "Don't you see?--_can't_ you see?--that I don't marry Gurnard for what he is in that sense, but for what he is in the other. It isn't a marriage in your sense at all. And ... and it doesn't affect you ... don't you _see_? We have to have done with one another, because ... because...." I had an inspiration. "I believe," I said, very slowly, "I believe ... you _do_ care...." She said nothing. "You care," I repeated. She spoke then with an energy that had something of a threat in it. "Do you think I would? Do you think I could?... or dare? Don't you understand?" She faltered--"but then...." she added, and was silent for a long minute. I felt the throb of a thousand pulses in my head, on my temples. "Oh, yes, I care," she said slowly, "but that--that makes it all the worse. Why, yes, I care--yes, yes. It hurts me to see you. I might.... It would draw me away. I have my allotted course. And you--Don't you see, you would influence me; you would be--you _are_--a disease--for me." "But," I said, "I could--I would--do anything." I had only the faintest of ideas of what I would do--for her sake. "Ah, no," she said, "you must not say that. You don't understand.... Even that would mean misery for you--and I--I could not bear. Don't you see? Even now, before you have done your allotted part, I am wanting--oh, wanting--to let you go.... But I must not; I must not. You must go on ... and bear it for a little while more--and then...."