"Mr. Melville," she said, "you know I don't understand. I thought--I scarcely know what I thought. I thought he was trivial and foolish to let his thoughts go wandering. I agreed--I see your point--as to the difference in our effect upon him. But this--this suggestion that for him she may be something determining and final-- After all, she----" "She is nothing," he said. "She is the hand that takes hold of him, the shape that stands for things unseen." "What things unseen?" My cousin shrugged his shoulders. "Something we never find in life," he said. "Something we are always seeking." "But what?" she asked. Melville made no reply. She scrutinised his face for a time, and then looked out at the sunlight again. "Do you want him back?" he said. "I don't know." "Do you want him back?" "I feel as if I had never wanted him before." "And now?" "Yes.... But--if he will not come back?" "He will not come back," said Melville, "for the work." "I know." "He will not come back for his self-respect--or any of those things." "No." "Those things, you know, are only fainter dreams. All the palace you have made for him is a dream. But----" "Yes?" "He might come back--" he said, and looked at her and stopped. He tells me he had some vague intention of startling her, rousing her, wounding her to some display of romantic force, some insurgence of passion, that might yet win Chatteris back, and then in that moment, and like a blow, it came to him how foolish such a fancy had been. There she stood impenetrably herself, limitedly intelligent, well-meaning, imitative, and powerless. Her pose, her face, suggested nothing but a clear and reasonable objection to all that had come to her, a critical antagonism, a steady opposition. And then, amazingly, she changed. She looked up, and suddenly held out both her hands, and there was something in her eyes that he had never seen before. Melville took her hands mechanically, and for a second or so they stood looking with a sort of discovery into each other's eyes. "Tell him," she said, with an astounding perfection of simplicity, "to come back to me. There can be no other thing than what I am. Tell him to come back to me!" "And----?" "Tell him _that_." "Forgiveness?" "No! Tell him I want him. If he will not come for that he will not come at all. If he will not come back for that"--she halted for a moment--"I do not want him. No! I do not want him. He is not mine and he may go." His passive hold of her hands became a pressure. Then they dropped apart again. "You are very good to help us," she said as he turned to go. He looked at her. "You are very good to help me," she said, and then: "Tell him whatever you like if only he will come back to me!... No! Tell him what I have said." He saw she had something more to say, and stopped. "You know, Mr. Melville, all this is like a book newly opened to me. Are you sure----?" "Sure?"