able to get out of.

A moment later she was in the room.

An absolute limpness had come over him. If his life had depended on it,
he couldn't have lifted his hand. The surface of his mind examined every
detail of her--the intense whiteness of her face and the severe
blackness of her clothes, the fact that she wore no jewel of any sort,
not even a ring--except, of course, her wedding-ring. He had never seen
it before and it seemed a gaudy splash of colour out of harmony with the
rest of her.

She took off her hat and laid it on the table. Then she walked to the
window, touching the things she passed with a little caressing gesture.
He noticed that she picked up the unpointed pencil and he felt a little
desolate feeling, as if he had lost his only friend.

Suddenly, she turned round, "I am leaving England to-morrow," she said.

He shivered at her velvety voice, as he would have shivered had his hand
touched suede. "Well," his voice was too natural to be natural, "you
don't want to say good-bye to me again, do you?"

"Is there such a thing as 'good-bye,'" she mused; "won't this room
always be a part of my life? Can one end anything? A chapter, a
paragraph, a sentence even? Doesn't everything one has ever done go on
living in spite of subsequent events?"

Relentlessly he brought her down from her generalisations.