o the window.
Wentworth stood a long time looking at him. He was evidently waiting for
him to come in. He sat stolidly on as if he were glued to his chair,
smoking one cigarette after another.

At last he got up. Surely he would go now. He walked to the bookshelves
that lined the walls, inspected the books, selected one, and settled
himself with a voluminous sigh in his arm-chair once more.

Wentworth stole away across the grass as noiselessly as he had come, and
disappeared in the darkness.

CHAPTER XXXVII

Age by age,
The clay wars with His fingers and pleads hard
For its old, heavy, dull, and shapeless ease.

--W. B. YEATS.

Wentworth never knew how he spent the night, if indeed that interminable
tract in which time stopped could have been one night. It was longer
than all the rest of his life put together. In later years, in peaceful
later years, confused memories came to him of things that he must have
seen then, but of which he took no heed at the time; of seeing the
breath of animals like steam close to the ground; of stumbling suddenly
under a hedgerow on a huddled, sleeping figure with a white face, which
struggled up unclean in the clean moonlight, and menaced him in a foul
atmosphere of rags.

And once, many years later, when he was taking an unfamiliar short cut
across the downs, he came upon a little pool in an old chalk pit, and
recognised it. He had never seen it by day, but he knew it. He had
wandered to it on a night of moon and mist, and had seen a fox bring
down her cubs to drink just where that twisted alder branch made an arch
over the water.

Wentworth sat by that chalk pit on the down utterly spent in body and
mind hour after hour, till the moon, which had been tangled in the alder
stooped to the violet west with one great star to bear her company. Who
shall say through what interminable labyrinths, through what sloughs,
across what deserts, his tortured mind had dragged itself all night? The
sun had gone down upon his wrath. The moon had gone down upon his wrath.

The land was grey. The spectral horses moving slowly in the misty fields
were grey. A streak of palest saffron light showed where the dim earth
and dim sky met.

A remembrance came to him of a summer dawn such as this, years and years
ago, when Michael had been dangerously ill, and how his whole soul had
spent itself in one passionate supplication that he might not be taken
from him.