Yesterday or tomorrow might hold it for them, for men hope for things remembered, for a past irrevocably lost. Why did she talk to him of this other man? He knew; he knew so much better than she did; he realized him now so completely in his own mind, that they might be one and the same man. She spoke softly, without raising her voice: but the need she felt to make him understand, to find expression for her desire, gave it apparently an infinite flexibility; and from time to time he felt again on his sleeve the touch of that disturbing hand. The dead words there on the paper before him, those graven and rigid symbols, could never again kindle with the movement and persuasion of her living voice. They too, were the mere traces of something that had passed. Some kind of warmth seemed to come from her, and flow over the surface of his skin with little pricklings of fire, and to lay hold of his veins, glowing there, until the lit blood rose and sang in his head.

‘Je t’aime, chéri! Je t’aime éperdument! Je n’aime que toi;’ she almost chanted it; and suddenly his arm was round her shoulder, and his mouth was shut fast down there behind her ear, where the hair swept upwards from the firm white neck. She collapsed astonishingly under his touch; neither towards him nor away from him; she seemed to go to nothing in her chair. She pushed him away with her right hand, firmly, quickly. He shifted, shifting his chair away, too, and then put up a hand to his brow. He was sweating lightly. The other hand went into his pocket. He stood up, feeling criminal, and looked at her.

‘Vous m’aimez?’ There was a kind of rage in his suffocated voice, and she turned her face to him, looking at him with eyes in which was neither anger nor fear, but only the surprise of recognition. It was as though she had not known him before, but now she remembered. He sat again, turned sideways towards her; and put his hands over her hands lying clasped in front of her on the table. They remained still, impassive.

‘Vous m’aimez? C’est vrai?’

There were light steps in the hall; they heard someone heave a sigh of relief. Oh, là! là! And Madame came from the passage into the kitchen. She put her basket on the dresser, and turned to them.

‘Bon jour, monsieur!’ she said almost gaily.

‘Bon jour, madame!’

She looked at the paper, pens, and ink on the table, and a smile of amused comprehension came into her eyes. She lifted her hands and let them fall again with a gesture of despairing humour.

‘C’est fini, maintenant?’

‘Oui, madame,’ said Bourne tranquilly; ‘c’est fini.’

He did not rise from his chair immediately: a point of some delicacy restrained him.

‘What’s ’e want to go back an’ ’ave a glass o’ wine wi’ the corporals for?’ Martlow asked. ‘Why don’t ’e stay an’ ’ave another bon night with us? You can get all the bloody wine you want ’ere.’