He nerved himself to come to a point at which he had long been aiming:
"Look here, Edith! Why did you marry him?"
"Do you mean, why did I marry him in particular, or why did I marry any
one?"
"I mean both."
"Oh, I don't know. There--there seemed to be reasons."
That was at Tunbridge Wells--in the twilight, on the terrace of the old
Calverly Hotel. They were sitting under a great hawthorn in full bloom.
The air was sweet with the scent of it. It was sweet, too, with the
scent of flowers and of new-mown hay. In a tree at the edge of the
terrace a blackbird was singing to a faint crescent moon. There was
still enough daylight to show the shadows deepening toward Bridge and
over Broadwater Down, while on the sloping crest of Bishop's Down Common
human figures appeared of gigantic size as they towered through the
gloaming.
Edith was pouring the after-dinner coffee. It was the first time they
had dined together. On the other days she had made it a point to be back
in London before nightfall; but she had so far yielded to him now as to
be willing to wait for a later train.
"What sort of reasons?" he urged.
"Oh, I don't know," she said again, pensively, dropping a lump of sugar
into his coffee-cup. She added, while passing the cup to him: "It isn't
so easy for a woman to be--to be drifting about--especially with two
children."
"But why should you have drifted about, when you knew that at a sign
from you--?"
She went on as if he hadn't spoken. "And when I saw you had dismantled
the house and other people were living in it--I couldn't help seeing
that, you know, in driving by--"
"But, good God, Edith, you wouldn't have come back to me?"