Such a reminder was the German primer which he took down from a dusty shelf on the Thursday after meeting Leni in Sandmouth. Since he had to see her the next day he thought he might as well look over a few words. The book brought memories of student days in London, when he had walked the wards at St. Thomas’s Hospital and lodged near by in Battersea. He had studied German then with some idea of having a year’s specializing in Vienna, but the plan was abandoned when his father died and left far less money than had been expected. Feeling that he must begin to earn something to support his mother, he had then used up a small inheritance to buy a general practice in a Manchester suburb, where for several years he was both overworked and under-rewarded. He fell ill, debts accumulated, his mother died, and eventually there was nothing left but to sell out at a loss and take a long holiday. After this he bought the Calderbury practice, then an inferior one, and settled down in the more congenial atmosphere of a small cathedral market town. But he still could not convert his skill and effort into anything that would pay rates and bills. He was one of those men who have no knack of extracting financial profit, and very soon he might have become that pathetic thing, a bankrupt doctor, had not Jessica taken his affairs in hand.

Jessica was a year or two older than he. Even in those days she had had a tough, leathery skin (the result of much gardening) and a rigid eye (the result of much chairmanship of small meetings). Indefatigable at the tea urn, both in drawing-rooms and in church halls, she might have made an admirable colonial bishop’s wife — and, indeed, would have if a certain young vicar, since raised to the episcopacy, had not preferred someone far less suitable. After that she had taken pains to marry the little doctor.

And he, worried by debts (not really worried, but just bothered, for botheration was as much as anything connected with money could ever cause him), allowed himself for a short time the necessary illusion that passive willingness was really active desire.

It had been, by outward signs, a successful marriage. Jessica had reorganized all of David’s life that was reorganizable; the house at the corner of Shawgate was bought with her money; and though David jibbed at complete supervision of his business affairs, her secret interferences were more frequent and more considerable than he ever suspected. She turned a loss into a profit and David gave her all the credit for doing it without any profound conviction that it was worth doing.

Friday morning came — only a few hours after he had closed the German primer at his bedside. The day promised to be fine, and as the train left Calderbury the twin towers of the Cathedral rose above a film of mist that covered the town. They looked spectral, sailing through the sky when a curve of the line kept them long in view. Presently the line crossed the water meadows to the bridge over the river, then entered a cutting. It was all such a simple thing, to travel these few miles, yet that morning it seemed to David inexpressibly strange and lovely. He opened his paper and began to read, but as soon as the train emerged from the cutting his eyes wandered again, over fields where cattle stood and where the steam from the engine, rolling in little clouds, caused them hardly to stir. Serene and secure, this world, poised on an edge it could not glimpse. The train wheels caught a rhythm which, for some reason, translated into German words, words that he must have read in the text-book the night before: —