"I love you," he said.
"I shall love you for ever, my dear," she replied. "Believe me."
"I do."
Her words seemed subtly inappropriate and the old sense of foreboding came and went. He kissed her. She gasped and her hands went beneath his blouse; he felt her nails in his flesh. He kissed her shoulder. She drew him to her.
"It is all I can give you…" She seemed to be weeping.
"It is everything."
She groaned. With a touch of a power-ring he disrobed, stroking the tears on her cheek, kissing her trembling shoulder, until at last he drew back the sheet and pressed himself upon her.
"The lamp," she said. He caused it to vanish and they were in complete darkness.
"Always, Jherek."
"Oh, my dearest."
She hugged him. He touched her waist. "Is this what you do?" he asked. "Or is it this?"
Then they made love; and in the fullness of time they slept.
The sun had risen. He felt it upon his eyelids and he smiled At last the future, with its confusion and its fears, was banished; nothing divided them. He turned, so that his first sight of the morning would be of her; but even as he turned the foreboding came back to him. She was not there. There was a trace of her warmth, little more. She was not in the room. He knew that she was not in the house.
"Amelia!"
This was what she had decided. He recalled her anecdote of the young man who had only dared declare his love when he knew he would never see her again. All his instincts had told him, from that moment by the fountain, that it was her intention to answer her Victorian conscience, to go back with Harold Underwood to 1896, to accept her responsibilities. It was why she had said what she said to him last night. As a woman, she would always be his, but as a wife she was committed to her husband.
He plunged from his bed, opening the window, and, naked, flung himself into the dawn sky, flying as rapidly as his power-rings could carry him, rushing towards the city, her name still on his lips, like the mad cry of a desolate seabird.
"Amelia!"
Once before he had followed her thus, coming too late to stop her return to her own time. Every sensation, every thought was repeated now, as the air burned his body with the speed of his flight. Already he planned how he might pursue her back to Bromley.
He reached the city. It seemed to sleep, it was so still.
And near the brink of the pit he saw the great open structure of the time-machine, the chronomnibus. Aboard he could see the time-traveller at the controls, and the policemen, all in white robes, with their helmets upon their heads, and Inspector Springer, also in white, wearing his bowler, and Harold Underwood with his hay-coloured hair and his pince-nez twinkling in the early sun. And he glimpsed Amelia, in her grey suit, seemingly struggling with her husband. Then the outlines of the machine grew faint, even as he descended. There was a shrill sound, like a scream, and the machine faded away and was gone.
He reached the ground, staggering.
"Amelia." He could barely see for his tears; he stood hopeless and trembling, his heart pounding, gasping for air.
He heard sobbing and it was not his own sobbing. He lifted his head.
She lay there, in the black dust of the city, her face upon her arm. She wept.
Half-sure that this was a terrible illusion, merely a recollection from the city's memory, he approached her. He fell on his knees beside her. He touched her grey sleeve.
She looked up at him. "Oh, Jherek! He told me that I was no longer his wife…"
"He has said as much before."
"He called me 'impure'. He said that my presence would taint the high purpose of his mission, that even now I tempted him … Oh, he said so many things. He threw me from the machine. He hates me."
"He hates sanity, Amelia. I think it is true of all such men. He hates truth. It is why he accepts the comforting lie. You would have been of no use to him."
"I was so full of my resolve. I loved you so much. I fought so hard against my impulse to stay with you."
"You would martyr yourself in response to the voice of Bromley? To a cause you know to be at best foolish?" He was surprised by his words and it was plain that he surprised her, also.
" This world has no cause at all," she told him, as he held her against him. "It has no use for one such as me!"
"Yet you love me. You trust me?"
"I trust you, Jherek. But I do not trust your background, your society — all this…" She stared bleakly at the city. "It prizes individuality and yet it is impossible to feel oneself an individual in it. Do you understand?"
He did not, but he continued to comfort her.
He helped her to her feet.
"I can see no future for us here," she told him. She was exhausted. He summoned his locomotive.
"There is no future," he agreed, "only the present. Surely it is what lovers have always wished for."
"If they are nothing but lovers, Jherek, my dear." She sighed deeply. "Well, there is scarcely any point to my complaints." Her smile was brave. "This is my world and I must make the best of it."
"You shall, Amelia."
The locomotive appeared, puffing between high, ragged towers.
"My sense of duty —" she began.
"To yourself, as I said. My world esteems you as Bromley never could. Accept that esteem without reserve; it is given without reserve."
"Blindly, however, as children give. One would wish to be respected for — for noble deeds."
He saw clarity, at last. "Your going to Harold — that was 'noble'?"
"I suppose so. The self-sacrifice…"
" 'Self-sacrifice' — another. And is that 'virtuous'?"
"It is thought so, yes."
"And 'modest'?"
"Modesty is often involved."
"Your opinion of your own actions is 'modest'?"
"I hope so."
"And if you do nothing save what your own spirit tells you to do — that is 'lazy', eh? Even 'evil'?"
"Scarcely evil, really, but certainly unworthy…"
The locomotive came to a rest beside them, where the chronomnibus had lately been.
"I am enlightened at last!" he said. "And to be 'poor', is that frowned upon by Bromley."
She began to smile. "Indeed, it is. But I do not approve of such notions. In my charity work, I tried to help the poor as much as I could. We had a missionary society, and we collected money so that we could purchase certain basic comforts…"
"And these 'poor' ones, they exist so that you might exercise your own impulses towards 'nobility' and 'self-sacrifice'. I understand!"
"Not so, Jherek. The poor — well, they just exist . I, and others like me, tried to ease their conditions, tried to find work for the unemployed, medicine for their sick."
"And if they did not exist? How, then, would you express yourself?"
"Oh, there are many other causes, all over the world. Heathen to be converted, tyrants to be taught justice, and so on. Of course, poverty is the chief source of all the other problems…"
"I could perhaps create some 'poor' for you."
"That would be terrible. No, no! I disapproved of your world before I understood it. Now I do not disapprove — it would be irrational of me. I would not change it. It is I who must change." She began to weep again. "I who must try to understand that things will remain as they are throughout eternity, that the same dance will be danced over and over again and that only the partners will differ…"
"We have our love, Amelia."
Her expression was anguished. "But can't you see, Jherek, that it is what I fear most! What is love without time, without death?"
"It is love without sadness, surely."