There was the deep chair in which Louis and she had so often kissed and held each other: here was a case she had come upon while packing – full of his letters and drawings: there on the mantelpiece was the Tanagra figurine with blown out drapery which he had brought her from Paris, declaring it was like her. All the little room spoke of him and of what he stood for. And mingling with these passionate memories were thoughts of Roddy who was dead, of Ollie who was soon going to Canada to make the third in a patched-up reconciliation between her parents. Wrenched with sobbing she lay back in the shadowed room. She cried a long time, so that when at length she was done, the evening had drawn greyly in. But she did not stir to light the lamp, and even when rain began to fall, beating more and more heavily against the black window-panes, she had no thought of drawing the curtains. There seemed no reason why she should ever move again. From shaking storm she had lapsed into stillness. Never before had she been sunk so deep in the blessed wells of nothingness.

How many minutes or hours passed then, she did not know. But the room had long been quite dark, when a sound from downstairs made her slip free of her abandonment in the low chair and stand alert listening. Her ears served her so beautifully at that moment that she could separate each from each – as an embroidress might separate a skein of coloured silken threads – all the faint vibrations of sound in the house. She heard Trissie open the door and parley with a visitor. It was impossible to distinguish words, but she knew immediately that Lawrence’s was the low voice asking if she was in, and she could supply the answer in Trissie’s doubtful murmur.

The next moment she was leaning over the wide-topped old banister of the staircase.

“I’m here,” she heard her own voice assuring Trissie. And almost before she had spoken, there was Lawrence standing before her.

On the little dark landing they could see each other’s faces as pale blurs only.

“How wet you are!” she exclaimed as he touched her hand with his, all cold with the rain, and she could smell the rain-soaked wool of his clothes.

“Yes. It is pouring.”

He followed her into the room while she groped for matches and lighted the lamp. And now, instead of her ears, it was her hands that moved with a new perfection and certitude that almost frightened her.