“You know,” Isabel turned to her gratefully. “Sometimes it was as if the spring turned backwards, he was caught in it”—she stopped to clasp her hands together nervously—“I’m no good at saying these things,” she said.

“On the contrary,” Damon said. She was aware that he was listening intently, that in some extraordinary way she had after all, something to give.

“It was a kind of black anger—like beating your fist on a wall. And he used to do just that when he was a boy. No one could reach him or touch him, not even Mother, at those times. We called it his ‘blackness.’ When he was a boy he used to get into fights, I mean physical fights, in those moods. Then when he was older and he couldn’t do that, it was another kind of destruction. He broke off with me when Mother died.” She felt their close attention around her like a shield. She knew that they really cared, cared quite differently from Henry who had simply written Edward off as a hopeless neurotic—as if that solved anything. “You see,” she said, looking over at Julia, meeting the compassion in her eyes like a balm, “we didn’t tell Edward that Mother was dying. He never knew, because he was at Oxford and Mother wanted him to have that year. But when he got back and she was dead—well, it was the end of us as a family. It was the end of Edward and me,” she said, and at last she was laying the burden down. “I still don’t understand it, but I remember running up the stairs to his room as if there were a fire, and he was standing at the open window—I ran and held him with all my strength and said, ‘No, Edward. You can’t. It’s the blackness—you know Mother called it the blackness’—and then he pushed me away and fell down on his bed and cried. But he never forgave me.” She took a long drink. “I’ve never told anybody all this. It’s so queer I should be telling you. I was so afraid of you——”

“We were rather afraid of you, as a matter of fact,” Damon said gently.

“Why?”

“We thought you were a stranger,” Julia broke in warmly. “We didn’t know.”

“I don’t believe in any of the things Edward believed in. You probably know that,” Isabel said. It was a relief to say it.

“But you believed in him?” Julia asked.

Isabel turned this over in her mind. She was feeling the effects of the drink, or of the plane, or of sheer exhaustion. “No,” she said, “I don’t think I could. He hurt me too much.”