hem. He had
told Ransome to go to a place where, as Ransome had remarked, he could
hardly have taken Mrs. Ransome. Then he had explained gently that he had
had enough knocking about for one day, that his head ached abominably,
and that he wished they would leave him alone. It was all he wanted. Then
they had left him alone, with Sarah. He was glad to be with her. She was
the only person who seemed to understand that all he wanted was to be let
alone.

She had been with him all day. She had sat beside him on the deck of the
yacht as they cruised up and down the coast till sunset. Afterwards, when
the Ransomes' friends had trooped in, one after another, and filled the
sitting-room with insufferable sounds, she had taken him into a quiet
corner and kept him there. He had felt grateful to her for that.

She had been angelic to him during dinner. She had let him eat as little
and drink as much as he pleased. And she had hardly spoken to him. She
had wrapped him in a heavenly silence. Only from time to time, out of the
divine silence, her woman's voice had dropped between them, soothing and
pleasantly indistinct. He had been drinking hard all day. He had been
excited, intolerably excited; and she soothed him. He was aware of her
chiefly as a large, benignant presence, maternal and protecting.

His brain felt brittle, but extraordinarily clear, luminous, transparent,
the delicate centre of monstrous and destructive energies. It burned
behind his eyeballs like a fire. His eyes were hot with it, the pupils
strained, distended, gorged with light.

This monstrous brain of his originated nothing, but ideas presented to
it became monstrous, too. And their immensity roused no sense of the
incredible.

The table had been cleared of everything but coffee-cups, glasses, and
wine. They still sat facing each other. Sarah had her arms on the table,
propping her chin up with her clenched hands. Her head was tilted back
slightly, in a way that was familiar to him; so that she looked at him
from under the worn and wrinkled white lids of her eyes. And as she
looked at him she smiled slightly; and the smile was familiar, too.

And he sat opposite her, with his chin sunk on his breast. His bright,
dark, distended eyes seemed to strain upwards towards her, under the
weight of his flushed forehead.

"Well, Wallie," she said, "I didn't get married, you see, after all."

"Married--married? Why didn't you?"

"I never meant to. I only wanted