"It is exactly that which I remember," he said.
"Then you are beyond me, and I cannot understand you at all. You seem to think--God knows what you think! Anyhow, the standard of honour which is yours is utterly incomprehensible to me. You approach me with a sort of calm gusto to tell me a canard you have picked out of the clubs or out of the gutter, and you seem to think I shall care! What I care about is something quite different, and that is that you should have told me. I suppose your object was to wound me, to punish me--so you put it to yourself, for my having disregarded your warning. It is true that you have wounded me, but not in the way you think. Not long ago you thought good to cast doubts on the way in which I told you I had spent my evening. This is one step worse. And I warn you that another step may take you too far! That is all I have to say."
She turned round and, with a quick movement of her finger, turned on the electric light and stood in all her splendid beauty before him. Her bosom heaved with her intense suppressed emotion, her eye was kindled, and her mouth, slightly parted with her quickened breath, just showed the white line of her teeth. And sudden amazement at her loveliness seized the man. He looked long, then got up and advanced to her.
"Marie, Marie!" he said with entreaty, and laid his hand on her arm.
Marie was sitting alone under the striped awning which covered the end of the terrace behind their country house in Surrey. The flap at the end was open, and from the bushes beyond came the hot, languid scent of the lilacs, the hot, languid murmur of the bees as they shouldered themselves into the clubs and clusters of the blossoms, the busy chirrup of sparrows intent on some infinitesimal occupation demanding a great deal of discussion. Unseen on the lawn below, a mowing-machine was making its clicking journeys up and down the grass, but no other sound marked the passage of the hot afternoon; no breeze stirred in the level fans of the cedar nor ruffled the lake, where the unwavering reflections of the trees were spread as sharp-cut and immobile as if they had been painted on a silver shield. On Marie's lap lay an unopened book, and she was as motionless as the mirroring lake.