Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/534

452 "I've got silly," she explained. "I'm so afraid of being a nuisance"

He assured that she wasn't that; he went on to say a good many things which he didn't mean, and in the end, he asked her to come out for a walk. She took up her hat at once and pinned it on without even a glance in the mirror; her eyes on his face, garrulous and happy again now.

As they descended through the silent house, her light voice seemed to flutter like a scrap of paper in the wind—a lost voice, that was never to alight in any heart.

It was a cold night and she was thinly dressed, but what did she care for that? She would have walked on for ever, anywhere, in any weather, so that he walked beside her. Without a word, she made him aware of that, and it hurt and angered him.

"This can't go on!" he thought. "It's the worst sort of folly. She’s got to be made to see"

He began to talk a little at random

"I shan't stop here long," he said. "I'm old enough to know that one place is very like another, and still I'm always looking for one that won't be."

"Oh! You're going away?" she asked, with a little gasp.

"Yes. There's nothing to keep me here," he answered.

They went on in silence for some time; now that he had made her see, he had a very uncomfortable consciousness that she was seeing very clearly in the dark at that moment.

"Well of course  you've got such a lot ahead of you " she said at last, in a trembling voice.

"Only what everyone else has," he answered, impatiently.

"You mean—dying?"

"Ending," he said.

"Maybe it isn't ending," she said, with an unconcealed sob. "I hope it isn't."

“Good Lord! Haven’t you had enough?”’ he demanded.

"No, no! I just wish I could have another chance"

"But have you ever had a chance?"

"Yes, I did! Oh, I could have been different!" she cried. "You don't know I could have been  Now, you see, I haven't anything Not anything. When I think how different I could have been! "