Her hands, which he was holding closely, she drew from him and laid them both on his breast and met his eyes full with her own. Her lips were slightly trembling, and she was as white as a winter day. In the moment of silence they passed like this, she seemed to him like some great precious pearl, some priceless rose fragrant, lustrous, made for him, gathered for him, and yet beyond his right. She seemed, above all, the woman, the mate; her glorious sex, her tenderness, her humanness, drew him and dazzled him; and, nevertheless, through his daze and over his desire, he heard with his finest her cry: "Jimmy, Jimmy, don't speak, don't speak. Ah, if you really love me..." He really loved her. Rising from where he knelt by her chair, Bulstrode went over, stood a second by the chimneypiece, and then took a few paces up and down the room, came back to her and said the thing the real man says to the woman he really loves: "I want to make you happy, Mary. I will do whatever you wish me to do." "Ah, then, go!" Bulstrode looked wearily about as though of its own accord a door might unclose or a portière lift. "Go where, pray, at this time of night, or morning?" "Oh, to The Dials. Ring for a motor; they will take you in again; or go to the rector's." The last of the fire had flared up. The flame went out. Sinking back in her chair, she waited in a tranced stillness, her eyes on the ashes of the fire. She had said her say out, perhaps the man knew it, and as she leaned back in the cushions he saw how completely it all lay with him at the end. She thought he came back and waited a second at her side; she thought he bent a moment over her, but she did not stir until the cold wind from an opening door, till the clicking of a latch made her start, and then she turned to see that he had gone. Bulstrode came back to the castle Christmas Day at nine o'clock. But the hour had the effect of being much earlier. The winter morning panoplied with festivity began its life slowly, and not all the day's brightness through which he had speeded his motor had yet come into the house. Bulstrode, drawn by it, went directly back to the room he had left several hours before, as though he expected still to find the woman he loved sitting before the extinguished fire. Two parlor maids were whisking their skirts and dusters out of the opposite door, a footman at their heels. Touches of the inevitable order which reduces an agreeable disarray to the impersonal had already been put to the scene of Jimmy's tenderness, and the curtains drawn well away from the long windows let in the morning that entered broadly and fell across the hearth and the fresh-lit fire.