dn't we--couldn't you go? Oh!
why doesn't this wretched war end? All that we've got here at home every
scrap of wealth, and comfort, and age, and art, 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 s