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 He had not known himself till then. Her face was whiter than ever in the dusk of the pergola, and her hands were plucking, plucking at the creepers, shaking down from the roses above white petals which he kept brushing from his coat.

"I'm sorry you're going back," she said. "Everybody will be sorry."

"I won't go until I have finished everything that I can do for you."

An expression came into her eyes that he had never seen before. "You have been a friend," she said. "Men make better things for themselves out of life than we do."

"They don't last," he said involuntarily.

"I should have said that so far as anything is immortal" He watched a little tightening of her lips.

"It takes less than you think to kill these things; friendship, loyalty"

"Yours was unassailable, yours and his"; she spoke more to herself than to him. "In those early days when we three went about together; that time in France, I realised that."

"In France?" he said stupidly.

"Yes. Don't you remember?"