"Why does he continue to write to you, and never come to see you?" Rose asked. "It's not fair to you. And there's George... If it wasn't for Paul Hallam you would marry George. He is a good fellow, and he's getting on. It would be a most suitable arrangement. You don't want to teach all your life. You want a home. Every woman does. Instead you fill your head with romantic nonsense, and make yourself miserable, and George miserable--for a man who doesn't care. You could forget him if you left off corresponding. Why do you let him play with you?" "He doesn't play with me," Esme answered, flushing. "He never asked me for anything more than friendship. I give him that because it is a help to him, and because he is lonely. Why cannot a man and a girl be friends?" "I should have thought your own case furnished an answer to that," Rose said. "In a friendship between a man and a girl one of them invariably falls in love. You can't get away from nature. The eternal question of sex hides behind all these unequal friendships. That's what makes them interesting. But these interesting relationships can spoil one's life. I wish that you had never met this man. I feel uneasy about it." Esme sat in an attitude of disturbed attention, and kept her eyes studiously averted from her sister's. There was just sufficient reason in her discursive statements to cause the girl to wince mentally. She was beginning to believe that she was giving more than Paul Hallam wanted from her, more than he dreamed of when he proposed continuing the friendship. This thought was humiliating; but only temporarily so: even as she felt its sting another thought drew the venom from it. If she could help him, even a little, it was worth while. Book 2--CHAPTER SEVENTEEN. "To revisit a familiar spot is like walking among tombstones. Every point recalls a memory, and memory belongs to the past." Very vividly, like something heard long ago but never before realised, these words which Hallam had uttered on the morning she left the Zuurberg all those weary months before, echoed in Esme's thoughts when she made her second journey up the mountain road. The truth of them struck her like a thing which hurts. Her memories came back to her, as he had said they would, with the dust on them. And there was no evading them; they obtruded at every point. At Coerney there was the same wait under the trees before the cart was ready to start; the same languid stillness brooded over the place, the same enervating heat. Here was the first tombstone. She looked about her with reminiscent eyes, marked the spot where she had sat with Hallam while they waited for the train to come in, realised the crowd of new impressions which jostled the memories in her brain, and fell into thought. The children were busy exploring. The sound of their gay, excited voices came to her distantly on the languid air. But she could not see them; their figures were hidden among the trees.