‘You told me to remake my life,’ he said, ‘and I have answered that I will not. Oh, Cecilia! I cannot tell you to do that! Do you know, it makes me wretched to think that Fordyce is here again. Forgive me for saying it. Tell me that you can never care for him. I do not ask to know anything more. Darling, do not be angry.’ He raised her face and looked into it. There was no anger, but a little wan ray of amusement played round her mouth. ‘You need not be afraid; there is nothing in him to care for. His only merits are his prospects, and Heaven knows they do not attract me,’ she replied. The clock on the mantelpiece struck, and the two looked up. Outside on the grass the shadows of the grazing sheep were long. His arm tightened round her. ‘I cannot go yet,’ he said. ‘A little longer, Cecilia--a few minutes--and then the sooner it is over the better.’ The room grew very still, and, through the open window, came the long fluting of a blackbird straying in the dew. All her life the sound carried Cecilia back to that hour. There seemed nothing more to be spoken but that last word that both were dreading. ‘This is only torment,’ she said at last--‘go now.’ An overpowering longing rushed through her to break the web that circumstances had woven between them, to take what she had renounced, to bid him stay, to trust to chance that time would make all well. How could she let him go when it lay in her hands to stave off the moment that was coming? She had reached the turning-point, the last piece of her road at which she could touch hands with happiness. He was holding her fast. ‘I am going,’ he said, in a voice like the voice of a stranger--someone a long way off. She could not speak. There were a thousand things which, when he was gone, she knew that she must blame herself for not saying, but they would not stay with her till her lips could frame them. ‘Perhaps we shall sometimes see each other,’ he whispered, ‘but God knows if I could bear it.’ They clung together in a maze of kisses and incoherent words. When they separated, she stood trembling in the middle of the room. He looked back at her from the threshold, and turned again. ‘Gilbert! Gilbert!’ she cried, throwing her arms round his neck. Then they tore themselves apart, and the door closed between them and upon everything that each had come to value in life. When the sound of his horse’s feet had died, she stayed on where he had left her. One who is gone is never quite gone while we retain the fresh impression of his presence. She knew that, and she was loth to leave a place which seemed still to hold his personality. She sat on, unconscious of time, until a servant came into shut the windows, and then she went downstairs and stood outside the front-door upon the flags. The blackbird was still on the grass whistling, but at the sudden appearance of her figure in the doorway, he flew, shrieking in rich gutturals, into cover. CHAPTER XVIII THE BOX WITH THE LAUREL-WREATH