rt, and music, I'd give it
all for the light and the sun out there. Wouldn't you?"

And Fort said he would, knowing well of one thing which he would not
give. And she knew that, as well as he.

They were both gayer than they had been for a long time; so that when he
had gone, she fell back once more on to the divan, and burying her face
in a cushion, wept bitterly.

V

1

It was not quite disillusionment that Pierson felt while he walked away.
Perhaps he had not really believed in Leila's regeneration. It was more
an acute discomfort, an increasing loneliness. A soft and restful spot
was now denied him; a certain warmth and allurement had gone out of his
life. He had not even the feeling that it was his duty to try and save
Leila by persuading her to marry Fort. He had always been too sensitive,
too much as it were of a gentleman, for the robuster sorts of evangelism.
Such delicacy had been a stumbling-block to him all through professional
life. In the eight years when his wife was with him, all had been more
certain, more direct and simple, with the help of her sympathy, judgment;
and companionship. At her death a sort of mist had gathered in his soul.
No one had ever spoken plainly to him. To a clergyman, who does? No one
had told him in so many words that he should have married again--that to
stay unmarried was bad for him, physically and spiritually, fogging and
perverting life; not driving him, indeed, as it drove many, to
intolerance and cruelty, but to that half-living dreaminess, and the
vague unhappy yearnings which so constantly beset him. All these
celibate years he had really only been happy in his music, or in far-away
country places, taking strong exercise, and losing himself in the
beauties of Nature; and since the war began he had only once, for those
three days at Kestrel, been out of London.

He walked home, going over in his mind very anxiously all the evidence he
had of Fort's feeling for Noel. How many times had he been to them since
she came back? Only three times--three evening visits! And he had not
been alone with her a single minute! Before this calamity befell his
daughter, he would never have observed anything in Fort's demeanour; but,
in his new watchfulness, he had seen the almost reverential way he looked
at her, noticed the extra softness of his voice when he spoke to her, and
once a look of sudden pain, a sort of dulling of his whole self, when
Noel had got up