"A second or a century later, at the end of a long, long silence, for me an infinity of happiness, she moved her head away from me and asked me to light her a cigarette. I gave it to her, and waited. I knew so well, you see, what was coming. I had been watching her, I had made a feast of all the movements of that amazing face. It was a sad face, wonderfully alive, but sad; and its sadness became fixed, her eyes were large and held no curiosity at all. I noticed the lack of curiosity in them, because one is so used to meeting it in women--they want to find out! But she, perhaps, in her splendid conceit, had found out, she _knew_, and she was sad--had she not said downstairs that she knew? I didn't care then whether she knew or not, for then life was before me, the present and the future were in exquisite certainty; but now, as I waited and watched her draw her cigarette, I looked back on that future, and was really terrified of the present. There are moments of ice-clear sanity in all of us--you must know those moments?--when you realise with helpless vividness what you can and what you cannot do, what you simply cannot alter. And so with this moment and this woman; she was inexorable, I could not alter her, I could do nothing but wait--for the epilogue to that prelude played long ago downstairs, when she had put her hands on my shoulders and told me that she was warning me.... "'But perhaps you will think me very vain?' she asked at last, very quietly. "'Because you are thinking you will make me wretched by what you are going to say?' "'Oh, you are too quick!' she murmured. And she raised her head on her elbow and looked at me. "'Dear Noël Anson,' she said, 'our lives go different ways. To-day we had never met, and to-morrow it must be as though we had never met. For life is not a romance, it is a reality, and it is much stronger than our--inclinations? And even if I loved you it would be the same, I should be saying what I am saying now, because in me there is something much stronger than love, much more inevitable.... Please, you must believe me, it will hurt me if you do not believe me. I am not playing any more. I do not play with memories of crushed orchids, because it is only fools who think there is no pleasure in being serious ... just sometimes.' "'It is no use for me to say any more,' she said, 'because if you like me very much then, anyway, you will be bitter about me--and if you do not like me very much then you will only think me (how is it?) an odd sort of woman.... I command you, and I put you on your honour to obey, that when you leave this house you will go into the brougham waiting for you without looking to see the number of the house, nor the name of the street, so that you will never see me again, you man.... But it is now very, very late, you must go, Don Noël, you must go! And take with you my blessings--Adieu!'