But suddenly, as they stood there face to face, almost
touching, she became something immeasurably alien and far off, and the
question died on his lips.
"Is that all?" she asked with a slight smile.
"Yes; you'd better go and dress," he said, and turned back to his room.
XVI
The turnings of life seldom show a sign-post; or rather, though the
sign is always there, it is usually placed some distance back, like the
notices that give warning of a bad hill or a level railway-crossing.
Ralph Marvell, pondering upon this, reflected that for him the sign had
been set, more than three years earlier, in an Italian ilex-grove. That
day his life had brimmed over--so he had put it at the time. He saw now
that it had brimmed over indeed: brimmed to the extent of leaving the
cup empty, or at least of uncovering the dregs beneath the nectar. He
knew now that he should never hereafter look at his wife's hand without
remembering something he had read in it that day. Its surface-language
had been sweet enough, but under the rosy lines he had seen the warning
letters.
Since then he had been walking with a ghost: the miserable ghost of his
illusion. Only he had somehow vivified, coloured, substantiated it, by
the force of his own great need--as a man might breathe a semblance of
life into a dear drowned body that he cannot give up for dead. All this
came to him with aching distinctness the morning after his talk with his
wife on the stairs.
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