My dear, some moments are eternal. It seems to me that as I write to tell you of this I am telling you not of something that happened two years ago but of a thing immortal. It is as if I and Mary were together there holding the realities of our lives before us as though they were little sorry tales written in books upon our knees....
It was still in the early afternoon that we came down again across the meandering ice-water streams to our old boat, and pushed off and rowed slowly out of that magic corner back to every-day again....
As we glided across the water and rounded the headland and came slowly into view of the hotel again, Mary was reminded of our parting and for a little while she was disposed to make me remain. "If you could stay a little longer," she said,--"Another day? If any harm is done, it's done."
"It has been beautiful," I said, "this meeting. It's just as if--when I was so jaded and discouraged that I could have put my work aside and despaired altogether,--some power had said, 'Have you forgotten the friendship I gave you?' ... But we shall have had our time. We've met,--we've seen one another, we've heard one another. We've hurt no one...."
"To-day. Before sunset. Isn't it right that I should go?"
"Stay," she whispered, with a light in her eyes.
"Of course," she said at last, "you're right. You only said--I would have said it for you if you had not. You're so right, Stephen.... I suppose, poor silly little things, that if you stayed we should certainly begin making love to each other. It would be--necessary. We should fence about a little and then there it would be. No barrier--to stop us. And neither of us wants it to happen. It isn't what we want. You would become urgent, I suppose, and I should be--coquettish. In spite of ourselves that power would make us puppets. As if already we hadn't made love.... I could find it in my heart now.... Stephen I could _make_ you stay....
"Oh! Why are we so tormented, Stephen? In the next world we shall meet, and this will trouble us no longer. The love will be there--oh, the love will be there, like something that has at last got itself fully born, got itself free from some queer clinging seed-case....
"We shall be rid of jealousy, Stephen, that inflammation of the mind, that bitterness, that pitiless sore, so that I shan't be tormented by the thought of Rachel and she will be able to tolerate me. She was so sweet and wonderful a girl--with those dark eyes. And I've never done her justice--never. Nor she me. I snatched you from her. I snatched you....