suit and a tucked white silk shirt that she thought very swagger. She knew he was trying to atone for his past aloofness, and she was only too glad to have him atone. What man could ever atone as he could, she thought. She herself wore one of her most charming garments, a diaphanous blue thing, appropriate not only to her mood, but to the climate of the day. They drank Benedictine in a mood of strange gaiety, and then he teased her about the three years.
“Why, I thought you had forgotten all about it,” she said.
“Oh, no,” he smiled over his glass at her, “I’ve been thinking of it.” He looked round. Lee was not in the room. “And you still love me, don’t you?” His eyes bored into hers.
“Indeed I do,” she said, over-emphasizing her tone a little. He put his glass to her lips, and his at the same place. And then Lee came in with the chicken.
They smoked together in the hammock afterwards until he asked for music. When she had been playing for an hour he went round to the front and looked through the window at her. He saw that for the time being she was lost, lost in that wonderful world of harmony where she could forget even him. He was glad that she had that. He forgot what she was playing as he looked at her, trying to fix that picture of her in his mind. He wanted it to blot out the one of the night before.
How near had he come to her, he wondered. What secrets had she still hidden from him? Love had not meant domination for either of them, nor had either tried to clutch at the other’s personality. They had kept their own freedom side by side, he thought, but even so, love was not enough. And he knew the end would have come some time, somehow.
