It was an added irony, it seemed to him, that they should have to say good-by just now, on what might have been the very day of their first meeting on his proposed mid-August return. It was hard to give her up to whatever life had in store for her, without him, at perhaps the exact point in time when he should have received her whole future into his own keeping—for he was sure now that if once he had come to Nuns Farthing as he was meant to come, on some mortal errand, he would have known her for his own and arranged his career accordingly. Not for Sabrina the hardy existence of a Frontier wife, as Alice might have been expected to face it. He would have resigned, for Sabrina, and built a life in England. He would have settled down, perhaps a little incredulously at first, in some niche at Whitehall, with long country week-ends at Nuns Farthing. He knew very well that he could have been useful at Whitehall, to the men who did not know what he already knew at first hand. He would have kept Sabrina safe....

Daydreams. Ghostly dreams of a happiness he had missed by a hair’s breadth of time, on some unfathomable miscalculation, while an obstinate, unswerving destiny still labored to bring them together. He felt that he stood on the edge of dizzying mysteries. She was his, but he was dead, and so today he would have to see her go from him, powerless to interfere even if he had dared. And he did not dare.

Conceivably, she would find her own way back to him some day. By then, the house would have a bad name— he would see to that—and they would be allowed to have it to themselves. A long, long wait for him, perhaps; years of unmeasured time in endless solitude. Presumably he would grow no older. And she? Sabrina—old?

Suddenly he was more afraid for Sabrina than he had ever been for himself in a perilous lifetime. What was ahead for her? Where would she turn in her loneliness and confusion? They would encourage her to marry some fool like George or like her father. She would be frightened—she would not understand—she would not know that he was waiting—she would make mistakes and be miserable....