"I didn't know I was dear," she said, in a very small voice.
Perhaps he did not hear it, for he went on: "If the splendid adventure is to end like this, let it end here--now. I've had the two days; you can't take those from me."
"I don't want to take anything from you, but--"
"Let's make an end of it, then," he said, ruthlessly, "since that's what you choose. Good-by, Princess. Let's shake hands and part friends." He rose. "Let's part friends," he repeated, and paused, remembering that you cannot go away and leave a lady planted in the Guildhall. Yet he could not say, "Let us part friends, and now I will call a cab."
She was more expert. "At least," she put it, "we needn't part here in the dark among the images of dead people. Come out into the sunshine and look at the pretty pigeons."
He was grateful to her. In the Guildhall yard the cab would happen, if it happened at all, naturally and without any effect of bathos.
They stood watching the sleek birds strutting on little red feet, and fluttering gray wings in the sunshine. She thought of the wood-pigeon in the wood by the river, and the calm brightness of yesterday held out beckoning hands to her.
"I didn't think it was going to end like this," she said.
"Are you quite sure it's impossible? The mock marriage, I mean? In books it's always so frightfully easy, even when the girl isn't helping?"
"I'm afraid it's impossible," said he. "I wish it wasn't. Look at that blue chap," he added, indicating a fat pigeon for the benefit of a passing boy. "You must go back to your aunts. And I must go back to . . . oh, well, there's nothing much for me to go back to."
They were walking along King Street now. "It does seem rather as though a sponge were going to pass over the slate . . . and there wouldn't be much left," she said.
He glanced at her, suddenly alert. If she felt that . . . why, then. . . .
He wished that the scene had not been in one of the most frequented streets of the City of London. If it had been in a drawing-room, for instance--her drawing-room--it would have been possible to say the words of parting with something of dignity and finality. But here, with--in the background and not to be evaded--that snorting taxicab over whose closed door their farewells must be made. . . . But need it be across a taxicab door?