James Milton’s attempt to come farther into her life, to regions by his acquaintance of them surely sufficiently ice-bound, appeared in the light of present considerations heroic: he had been staking his future. But his future, she recollected, spun itself off into infinity. He did not acknowledge finality anywhere; this made him leisurely-seeming and easily generous. His impulses in any direction were not intensified by her own sense of urgency. In the light shed serenely down from that ultimate spaciousness he was covering life at an equable pace. He presented himself an undriven, a comforting figure. She saw him conducting a funeral: voluminous, fluttering, milk-white, leaning like one of these angels over the yawn of a grave to scatter his handful of earth, his tribute to mortality; with the expression, a submerged beam, of this having in a cognizant Mind its order. The word ‘death’ used in his presence would have a slow-dying ring to it, to which one would be able to feel him subconsciously listening. She contemplated with a faint inclination a life shared with someone for whom it would have this overtone of significance.

And to be wanted! She remembered in what a mood she had climbed the stairs that morning, and she looked round her at the now for ever undesired dead. She tried to recall the feel of his handclasp and to imagine the touch of his lips. With a sigh: ‘I am very ordinary!’ she tried over any terms of endearment which seemed within the range of his manner, listening for the reverberation which, like the word death, she felt they would have for him.

Cordelia sat on the end of a grave among a little city of glass domes, looking up intelligently. The child had read so many novels that she might well have been expected to know what there was to be known about the affairs of the heart. Feeling the bright eyes of Cordelia fixed for some moments upon her, Sydney began to wonder whether her lips had been moving just now and, if so, what Cordelia had thought; she found that she might have gone so far as what in Cordelia’s novels would be called murmuring. Of this the child would approve too readily. For the moment, however, her attention did not seem to have wandered from the graves, and she was determined not to allow Sydney’s to do so either.

‘Did you know,’ she began, ‘that it costs a great deal of money to be buried permanently?’

‘It never occurred to me.’