"Yes. Good-bye!"
He stood up suddenly. "Then good-bye," he said, "and may God forgive you
as I do!" And he strode down between the marble tables and out by the
swing-door. It was a very good exit. At the corner he remembered that he
had gone away without paying for the tea, and his natural impulse was
to go back and remedy that error. And if he had they would certainly
have made it up. But how could he go back to say, "We are parting for
ever; but still, I must insist on the sad pleasure of paying for our
tea--for the last time"? He checked the silly impulse. What was tea, and
the price of tea, in this cataclysmic overthrowing of the Universe? So
she waited for him in vain, and at last paid for the tea herself, and
went home to wait there--and there, too, in vain, for he never came back
to her. He loved her with all his heart, and he, also, had what she had
never suspected in him--the literary sense. Therefore he, never dreaming
that the literary sense had inspired her too, perceived that to the
jilted lover two courses only are possible--suicide or "the front." So
he enlisted, and went to South Africa, and he never came home covered
with medals and glory, which was rather his idea, to the few simple
words of explanation that would have made all straight, and repaid her
and him for all the past. Because Destiny is almost without the literary
sense, and Destiny carelessly decreed that he should die of enteric in a
wretched hut, without so much as hearing a gun fired. Literary to the
soul, she has taken no other lover, but mourns him faithfully to this
hour. Yet perhaps, after all, that is not because of the literary sense.
It may be because she loved him. I think I have not mentioned before
that she did love him.