He supposed he ought to go up and begin to pack, but he did not feel like it. Instead he wandered out on the verandah to lie in the sun and watch the sea for a while. He came at last to a hexagonal tower-like extension of the verandah built over an abutment of rock falling sharply away on all sides except that toward the house. There was a drop of perhaps twenty-five feet from the broad railing of this extension to the ground below. Harry, who knew the house from his early days, had dubbed its peak-roofed excrescence the chamber up a tower to the east that Elaine guarded the sacred shield of Lancelot in; it was sometimes more briefly referred to as Elaine. It was a pleasant place to sit, but very windy on a day like this, and James was rather surprised to discover Beatrice sitting in one angle of the railing gazing silently out over the sea.
"Hullo," he said, listlessly sinking into a chair. "You've heard, I suppose?"
"I'm going to New York to-night," said James after a moment.
"I'm going home next month," said Beatrice.
Neither spoke for a while and then it began to dawn on them both that those two carelessly spoken sentences had much more to them than their face-value. They both had the uneasy sensation of being forced into a "situation."
"But why?" he persisted, knowing perfectly well why, at bottom.
"You ought not to have to ask that," she replied. "You, of all people.--Why are you going away to-night?" she added, turning toward him with sudden passion.
James' first impulse was to make a sharp reply, his second was to get up and walk away, and then his glance fell upon her face.... Oh, was there no end to mortal misery?
"I'm sorry, Beatrice," he said wretchedly; "I'm sorry--I didn't mean to hurt you."
"Oh, it's all right," she answered in his own tone of voice. Then for a long time neither of them moved nor spoke.
The situation was on them now in full force, and it was a sufficiently terrific one, for actual life; one which under other circumstances they would both have made every effort to break up. Yet neither of them thought of struggling against it now--there was so much else to struggle against. Great misfortunes inoculate people to small embarrassments; no one in the throes of angina pectoris has much time to bother about a cold in the head. Then, as their silence wore on, they began to be conscious of a certain sense of companionship.