when, not
yet in the Scudamore manner, they depended from the sky--stood where his
cousin had left him so abruptly. His lips, between comely grey moustache
and comely pointed beard, wore a mortified smile, and he gazed rather
dazedly at the spindleberries fallen on to the flagged courtyard from
the branch she had brought to show him. Why had she thrown up her head
as if he had struck her, and whisked round so that those dull-pink
berries quivered and lost their rain-drops, and four had fallen? He had
but said: "Charming! I'd like to use them!" And she had answered: "God!"
and rushed away. Alicia really was crazed; who would have thought that
once she had been so adorable! He stooped and picked up the four
berries--a beautiful colour, that dull pink! And from below the coatings
of success and the Scudamore manner a little thrill came up; the stir of
emotional vision. Paint! What good! How express? He went across to the
low wall which divided the courtyard of his expensively restored and
beautiful old house from the first flood of the River Arun wandering
silvery in pale winter sunlight. Yes, indeed! How express Nature, its
translucence and mysterious unities, its mood never the same from hour
to hour! Those brown-tufted rushes over there against the gold grey of
light and water--those restless hovering white gulls! A kind of disgust
at his own celebrated manner welled up within him--the disgust akin to
Alicia's "God!" Beauty! What use--how express it! Had she been thinking
the same thing?

He looked at the four pink berries glistening on the grey stone of the
wall, and memory stirred. What a lovely girl she had been with her
grey-green eyes, shining under long lashes, the rose-petal colour in her
cheeks and the too-fine dark hair--now so very grey--always blowing a
little wild. An enchanting, enthusiastic creature! He remembered, as if
it had been but last week, that day when they started from Arundel
station by the road to Burpham, when he was twenty-nine and she
twenty-five, both of them painters and neither of them famed--a day of
showers and sunlight in the middle of March, and Nature preparing for
full Spring! How they had chattered at first; and when their arms
touched, how he had thrilled, and the colour had deepened in her wet
cheeks; and then, gradually, they had grown silent; a wonderful walk,
which seemed leading so surely to a more wonderful end. They had
wandered round through the village and down, past the