For the moment it was clear that she wished everything to be as usual, the occasion to be framed as far as possible in the safety of gestures and habits which had been going on for years. Yet it was as if all these familiar gestures had now lost their meaning, lost the content which made them nourishing; they were empty gestures. It seemed to Orlando that this room, where nothing had changed since the days of Grace Kimlock’s father, were flying apart, and in a more subtle and frightening way as if he and his old friend were at such complete cross-purposes that they might as well be flying apart.

“Light the fire, there’s a dear,” Grace said in a gentler tone. “It’s chilly here. I feel old and cold, Orlando,” she said as if the thought of old age had never before crossed her mind. The fire helped, as a matter of fact. They could sit and say nothing. The fire spoke; they could listen to its language, watch the Cape Cod lighter flame up blue, and the pleated fans of paper blaze and enfold the birch logs in a sheet of brightness. They drank their tea. Then Grace leaned forward, her hands clasped before her, struggling perhaps to break the pattern she had herself set up.

“Why did he do it?” This was the question she had wandered crazily through the day asking and asking and searching for an answer. She had gone for a long walk by the river, had tried to read, had climbed up and down the stairs a hundred times as if to search for a small lost object, her glasses or a thimble. Now she flung the question at Orlando, and he saw the flush creep up in her throat with the force of it.

“I don’t know,” Orlando said quietly. He passed his cup absent-mindedly for more tea.

“You must know. You must tell me,” she said fiercely as if he were willfully withholding information. When she had poured his tea and handed it to him, she looked into the fire and murmured, “How could he do this to us, Orlando? that’s what I can’t understand. I’ll never forgive him, never,” she said without conviction, as if she were repeating by rote words which had ceased to have a meaning.

“It doesn’t matter now.” Orlando passed a thin hand over his forehead and held it there over his eyes.

“It matters to me, very much.”

“No doubt it does. But we won’t get the answer now, or perhaps ever, Grace.” It did not help at all, but Orlando was now thinned down by fatigue to the point where there was no excess kindness in him, only the bare bones of the truth. “This is not a simple matter. We shall go on living with it for the rest of our lives.”

“I can’t,” Grace said, “I’ve got to know.”