When he came back into the room, Edward was sitting, quite still, his hands between his knees, his head bowed.

“I have been looking at these Korean chrysanthemums all day like an old Chinese poet.” Fosca looked at them again, standing away as if he were looking at a painting. “Aren’t they fine?”

He watched Edward raise his head and look at them, unsmiling, as if he were looking through a screen, as if nothing outside himself had at this moment any reality. A large dark cloud had settled in the room—the room which a moment before seemed so rich and human, full of small bright objects, such as the paperweight of a penguin in a snowstorm, the little wooden donkey from Jerusalem, the brilliant enamel ash tray covered with flowers which his wife had given him years ago for a wedding anniversary. There had been flowers, music, the warm presences of all the familiar books, the soft gold curtains at the windows. There had been something airy and brilliant about it all. And now it was as if a great dark cloud had settled over it as Edward said, “I was wrong to come,” his voice excited and strained.

“Well, I don’t know. How do I know?” Fosca said gently. “You haven’t come for a long time. I don’t know what is happening to you.” Then he disappeared into the bathroom again, to measure out the coffee and fill the cups with water. Perhaps if he gave Edward a few moments, he would manage to relax a fraction, and then perhaps he would be able to talk.

“There,” Fosca said, as if the making of this coffee were a triumph, “you see.”

Edward got up quickly to take his cup, to insist that Fosca sit down now while he himself poured the milk, performing the familiar rite very precisely, then stood with his own cup in his hands and drank it half down at a gulp.

“Well, what is it, Edward?” Fosca looked up at the somber man before him, who had seemed like a son. But Edward was wandering about the room; he stopped to pick up the penguin paperweight, tossed it from one hand to another, then watched, absorbed, as the snow fall began.

“Wherever did you get this?” he asked.

“Grace gave it to me—isn’t it rather like her?”—Fosca smiled mischievously—“such an unmoved object, so irrefutable, so absolute in the middle of his snowstorm——”

“Enviable state,” Edward smiled and put it down. “Poor penguin.”

“Poor Grace, you mean?”

“I suppose so.” Edward flung himself down in the deep armchair. “I don’t know why I said it. I suppose I rather envy that solidification into certainty. What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”

“She’s not invulnerable, Edward,” Fosca said gently.