A chasm gaped in the little silence that followed. With his first words Joanna had suffered a hideous sinking of spirit. The very tones of his voice seemed echoing in response to some unsuspected hollowness in the world. She had a picture of her lover stamping with shamefaced bravado upon a vault in which his own dead body lay. Involuntarily she shut her eyes for a second. But she gave no other sign or word. She never again asked him for a drawing.

There were times when she felt she possessed him most in absence. When he was away he was in all she did, and she had increasing certitude that he felt his life vitalized by her. Never a letter-writer before, he had acquired, unasked, the habit of writing to her constantly and at length. He wrote from London, from Paris, from New York, from Moscow – flowing letters like his speech, and interspersed with drawings of people and things that had caught his fancy. (As his wife hated travelling he generally made his journeys alone). His hand-writing came to affect Joanna like his bodily presence, made her tremble through her being when her eye lighted upon it. And in return she filled her letters to him with spontaneous but not wholly artless glamour. She knew so well these days how to pique and interest him that it cost her no effort, was indeed a keen excitement and enjoyment.

This then was their solution for the time. From their two years as lovers they emerged as two distinct and separate streams of existence. Momentarily they might and did flow as one. But they were never so much in unison as when they flowed apart, each sweeping outwards round a rich individual curve, each rushing in an opposite direction but ever onwards and ever with gathering impetus towards the next brief mingling.

V