She turned upon me. “Look here,” she said, “I insist upon your being dead. Do you understand? I’m not joking. To-night you and I are out of life. It’s our time together. There may be other times, but this we won’t spoil. We’re—in Hades if you like. Where there’s nothing to hide and nothing to tell. No bodies even. No bothers. We loved each other—down there—and were kept apart, but now it doesn’t matter. It’s over.... If you won’t agree to that—I will go home.” “I wanted,” I began. “I know. Oh! my dear, if you’d only understand I understand. If you’d only not care—and love me to-night.” “I do love you,” I said. “Then _love_ me,” she answered, “and leave all the things that bother you. Love me! Here I am!” “But!—” “No!” she said. “Well, have your way.” So she carried her point, and we wandered into the night together and Beatrice talked to me of love.... I’d never heard a woman before in all my life who could talk of love, who could lay bare and develop and touch with imagination all that mass of fine emotion every woman, it may be, hides. She had read of love, she had thought of love, a thousand sweet lyrics had sounded through her brain and left fine fragments in her memory; she poured it out, all of it, shamelessly, skilfully, for me. I cannot give any sense of that talk, I cannot even tell how much of the delight of it was the magic of her voice, the glow of her near presence. And always we walked swathed warmly through a chilly air, along dim, interminable greasy roads—with never a soul abroad it seemed to us, never a beast in the fields. “Why do people love each other?” I said. “Why not?” “But why do I love you? Why is your voice better than any voice, your face sweeter than any face?” “And why do I love you?” she asked; “not only what is fine in you, but what isn’t? Why do I love your dullness, your arrogance? For I do. To—night I love the very raindrops on the fur of your coat!”... So we talked; and at last very wet, still glowing but a little tired, we parted at the garden door. We had been wandering for two hours in our strange irrational community of happiness, and all the world about us, and particularly Lady Osprey and her household, had been asleep—and dreaming of anything rather than Beatrice in the night and rain. She stood in the doorway, a muffled figure with eyes that glowed. “Come back,” she whispered. “I shall wait for you.” She hesitated. She touched the lapel of my coat. “I love you NOW,” she said, and lifted her face to mine. I held her to me and was atremble from top to toe. “O God!” I cried. “And I must go!” She slipped from my arms and paused, regarding me. For an instant the world seemed full of fantastic possibilities. “Yes, _Go!_” she said, and vanished and slammed the door upon me, leaving me alone like a man new fallen from fairyland in the black darkness of the night. III