Their eyes met fleetingly across the still, listening room. ‘The more I think of it,’ Lawford pushed slowly on, ‘the less I understand the frantic purposelessness of all that has happened to me. Until I went down, as you said, “a godsend of a little Miss Muffet,” and the inconceivable farce came off, I was fairly happy, fairly contented to dance my little wooden dance and wait till the showman should put me down into his box again. And now—well, here I am. The whole thing has gone by and scarcely left a trace of its visit. Here I am for all my friends to swear to; and yet, Herbert, if you’ll forgive me troubling you with this stuff about myself, not a single belief, or thought, or desire remains unchanged. You will remember all that, I hope. It’s not, of course, the ghost of an apology, only the mere facts.’ Herbert rose and paced slowly across to the window. ‘The longer I live, Lawford, the more I curse this futile gift of speech. Here am I, wanting to tell you, to say out frankly what, if mind could appeal direct to mind, would be merely as the wind passing through the leaves of a tree with just one—one multitudinous rustle, but which, if I tried to put into words—well, daybreak would find us still groping on....’ He turned; a peculiar wry smile on his face. ‘It’s a dumb world: but there we are. And some day you’ll come again.’ ‘Well,’ said Lawford, as if with an almost hopeless effort to turn thought into such primitive speech, ‘that’s where we stand, then.’ He got up suddenly like a man awakened in the midst of unforeseen danger, ‘Where is your sister?’ he cried, looking into the shadow. And as if in actual answer to his entreaty, they heard the clinking of the cups on the little, old, green lacquer tray she was at that moment carrying into the room. She sat down on the window seat and put the tray down beside her. ‘It will be before dark even now,’ she said, glancing out at the faintly burning skies. They had trudged on together with almost as deep a sense of physical exhaustion as peasants have who have been labouring in the fields since daybreak. And a little beyond the village, before the last, long road began that led in presently to the housed and scrupulous suburb, she stopped with a sob beside an old scarred milestone by the wayside. ‘This—is as far as I can go,’ she said. She stooped, and laid her hand on the cold moss-grown surface of the stone. ‘Even now it’s wet with dew.’ She rose again and looked strangely into his face. ‘Yes, yes, here it is,’ she said, ‘oh, and worse, worse than any fear. But nothing now can trouble you again of that. We’re both at least past that.’ ‘Grisel,’ he said, ‘forgive me, but I can’t—I can’t go on.’