'It was thundering when I left Lanyon,' he said, 'the sky was like ink over my head.
Why in the name of God doesn't it rain?'
The birds were hushed in the trees.
It was still very dark.
'I wish you did not have to go out again,' I said.
He did not answer.
He looked tired, so deathly tired.
'We'll talk over things this evening when I get back,' he said presently.
'We've got so much to do together, haven't we?
We've got to begin all over again.
I've been the worst sort of husband for you.'
'No!' I said.
'No!'
'We'll start again, once this thing is behind us.
We can do it, you and I.
It's not like being alone.
The past can't hurt us if we are together.
You'll have children too.'
After a while he glanced at his watch.
'It's ten past six,' he said,
'I shall have to be going.
It won't take long, not more than half an hour.
We've got to go down to the crypt.'
I held his hand.
'I'll come with you.
I shan't mind.
Let me come with you.'
'No,' he said.
'No, I don't want you to come.'
Then he went out of the room.
I heard the sound of the car starting up in the drive.
Presently the sound died away, and I knew he had gone.
Robert came to clear away the tea.
It was like any other day.
The routine was unchanged.
I wondered if it would have been so had Maxim not come back from Lanyon.
I wondered if Robert would have stood there, that wooden expression on his young sheep's face, brushing the crumbs from the snow-white cloth, picking up the table, carrying it from the room.
It seemed very quiet in the library when he had gone.
I began to think of them down at the church, going through that door and down the flight of stairs to the crypt.
I had never been there.
I had only seen the door.
I wondered what a crypt was like, if there were coffins standing there.
Maxim's father and mother.
I wondered what would happen to the coffin of that other woman who had been put there by mistake.
I wondered who she was, poor unclaimed soul, washed up by the wind and tide.
Now another coffin would stand there.
Rebecca would lie there in the crypt as well.
Was the vicar reading the burial service there, with Maxim, and Frank, and Colonel Julyan standing by his side?
Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
It seemed to me that Rebecca had no reality any more.