"Time to Kill."

A man visits his old lover, she now married with two children and living in squalor.

As she walks him out, he senses that "she wanted perhaps to express regret for things: or she wanted to get off her mind some oppressive, tortured explanation" but "whatever she wanted to say was never spoken...the eyes that were lifted up to him were quite dark and cold, and strangely repressed, as if they had got into the habit of not looking far."

In the Fortnightly (May 1940), The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (1940), Harper's Bazaar US (June, 1941), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947), The Good Corn and Other Stories (1974).