He stood in the window, drumming against the raised sash, and feeling
in every fibre the wistful tenderness with which she had spoken her
cousin's name.
"For that's the thing we've always got to think of--haven't we--by your
own showing?" she insisted.
"My own showing?" he echoed, his blank eyes still on the sea.
"Or if not," she continued, pursuing her own thought with a painful
application, "if it's not worth while to have given up, to have
missed things, so that others may be saved from disillusionment and
misery--then everything I came home for, everything that made my other
life seem by contrast so bare and so poor because no one there took
account of them--all these things are a sham or a dream--"
He turned around without moving from his place. "And in that case
there's no reason on earth why you shouldn't go back?" he concluded for
her.