“Horace is all right, indifferent, beautiful as always.” But the words did not carry the meaning, as they exchanged a smile, as at last they reached the moment of communion, and Grace leaned her head back against her chair and closed her eyes. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice, not bothering to catch the single tear which slid out and rolled down her cheek. “It’s going to be so lonely.”

“I think Edward will be with us for a long time to come,” he said gently. And then, “The dead help the living.”

She opened her eyes and sat up straight. “How?”

“I don’t know how. I’m not a mystic, as you know, my dear. I do not believe in anything like tangible presence”—he drew in his breath as if he was in physical pain—“and in this case a tangible presence would be a tormented one.”

“It was such a dreadful way to do it, Orlando—so brutal,” she murmured, following his thought. It was not an interruption.

He passed a hand over his forehead. He had seen what she had not seen. He found that he was sweating.

“I think perhaps it is that death leaves us the essence of the person,” he said, but it had become a great effort. At the moment he was nowhere near the essence of Edward. He was fighting off the image, not of horror—it was not like that. But the sense he had, when he looked down at the calm empty face above a body cut in two, that Edward was not there, that this was not Edward.

“What was Edward’s essence?” she whispered.

“We can’t know yet,” he answered quickly. “It will take time. I can only tell you that after Sylvia died it was more than two years before I could get past the image of her suffering, before I could even think of her as she really was. It takes time,” he said again, stroking his beard.

At Sylvia’s name, a name Orlando so rarely mentioned and only under the stress of such a moment, Grace turned to him and perhaps for the first time looked at him, really saw him, sitting there, his eyes sunk so deep into the bone from tiredness that he looked like a very old man. “I’m an egotistic old woman, Orlando. Forgive me,” she said drily. “My dear, you must go home and get some rest. I am going to get Ellen to pack up a little basket that you can take home for your supper. You must forgive me,” she said again, as she got up to go to the kitchen.

“We’re old friends,” he murmured, but she had already gone.