'A year ago--just a year ago,' she said, 'we sat here like this. I always remember that day as a day of pause before I started on adventures. Oh, Charlie, on what tiny things life and happiness depend! Just as a bullet may pass within an inch of your head, and not touch you, when another inch would have killed you, so the smallest incident may turn the whole course of things. For, do you know, if I had not been in Mrs. Emsworth's room when Mr. Bilton came in, I believe I should have married him.' 'Well, then you see that had just got to happen,' said Charlie, smiling at her. 'I suppose so. Do you know I am very happy to-day.' 'Why particularly?' 'Ah, one never knows the reason for happiness. If one knows the reason, one is only pleased. Ah! there is the train coming out of the cutting. What was it we settled it said?' 'You thought "Utility"; I thought "Brutalité." They sound very much alike.' There was a pause; the train rumbled itself away into the distance, and its diminuendo grew overscored again with the sounds of summer. 'I met Mr. Bilton again the other night,' said Sybil. 'He wished me every happiness. I felt rather inclined to send the wish back, like Bertie with Mrs. Emsworth's wedding-present. He didn't please me, somehow. I don't trust him. Charlie, he is extraordinarily like you.' 'Many thanks.' 'You old darling! Do you know, I believe it was that which made me first--first cast a favourable eye on him.' 'And what made you firmly remove that favourable eye?' 'I have told you. Then I came back to England and found you ill, and I embarked on a career of most futile diplomacy. I wanted to win you back to life, you see, without permitting or harbouring any sentiment. You proposed to die because you were bored. That seemed to me feeble, futile.' Charlie laughed. 'It was rather. But under the same circumstances I should do the same again.' 'Ah, the same circumstances can't occur.' He turned to her with the love-light shining brightly in his eyes. 'Let us "lean and love it over again,"' he said. 'How did it happen? What change came to you? Tell me.' 'And to you?' 'There never came a change to me. I have always loved you.' 'It was your illness first of all,' she said, 'and that made me want to help. I am very practical; the futility of your dying seemed to me so stupid. And as my handiwork, the attachment of you to life, grew, I got rather proud of it. It was like taking a plant that was lying all draggled in the mud and training it upright.' She paused a moment. 'That grew,' she went on, 'till one night you were taken suddenly ill at Davos. I came up to see you, do you remember? And at that moment--this is the only way I can explain it--I began to become a woman. So that, if you or I could owe each other anything, dear, the debt I owe you is infinitely greater than what you owe me. I gave you perhaps a few years of life, you gave me life itself and love.'