“I don’t know.” Edward did not turn back. “I’ll have to think about it.”

Fosca laid a hand gently on his shoulder. “Think about it,” he said, and then Edward was gone.

Fosca stood there a moment, facing the closed door. At the end Edward had made an effort, had actually perhaps for half an hour forgotten himself and the anguish he carried around these days. Yes, for a half-hour or more, Edward had come out of his prison.

The big door downstairs closed loudly and then he could hear, amazingly clearly in the silence, Edward’s footsteps, quick, definite, first quite staccato and loud, then gradually fading out into the silence. Fosca went to the window and raised the shade to look out at the amber leaves lit up by a street lamp in a great flaming arc, then at the black tarred road below. In the house opposite, light burned in the attic windows where some student lived. Far off a streetcar ground to a stop, then grated forward to a harsh singing cry as it regained momentum. And then again, the silence poured in.

It was just after ten, he noted. That meant that he had two hours at his desk, and he went automatically to sit down there, to take out the neat pile of manuscript, wide lined pages across which his small definite script ran in an unbroken stream. It was a book in which Fosca was passionately interested, an assessment of Italian thought and letters since Mussolini, and he was now engaged in the very core of the first part, an evaluation of Croce. As he took out the cards on which his notes were inscribed, he felt as if his mind were a great sea bird, a seagull perhaps, circling and circling round in the dark and the silence, waiting to dive down to seize an idea like a fish. It was an intricate, but at the same time exhilarating, act, this act of pure thought. Very carefully he unscrewed his pen, moved some little pads to within easy reach and then reread the paragraph he had set down the night before.

The sharp imperative ring of the telephone seemed at that moment a violent attack. He picked it up automatically, cursing himself for a reaction he could not control.

“Orlando—” the old familiar voice asked his name like a question.

“Oh, hello, Grace dear, what is it?”

“You sound cross,” she accused.

“Well, I was just getting to work, as a matter of fact. Edward has been here.”

“Oh, I’m glad. That’s what I called you about. You know then——”

“Well, I gathered there had been some sort of argument at your meeting. Edward takes it much too seriously, of course——”

“You’re so balanced, Orlando. I hate balanced people.”

“Oh, very well,” he answered sharply, “it is serious, I suppose.” Grace and he communicated always on a tone of irritability which concealed tenderness.