ter had foreshadowed. He read the final, unqualified statement, the
terse regrets. He stood quite still for a moment or so, staring at the
words....

It was a mile and a quarter from the post office to the Dower House, and
it was always his custom to give telegraph messengers who came to his
house twopence, and he wanted very much to get rid of the telegraph
girl, who stood expectantly before him holding her red bicycle. He felt
now very sick and strained; he had a conviction that if he did not by an
effort maintain his bearing cool and dry he would howl aloud. He felt in
his pocket for money; there were some coppers and a shilling. He pulled
it all out together and stared at it.

He had an absurd conviction that this ought to be a sixpenny telegram.
The thing worried him. He wanted to give the brat sixpence, and he had
only threepence and a shilling, and he didn't know what to do and his
brain couldn't think. It would be a shocking thing to give her a
shilling, and he couldn't somehow give just coppers for so important a
thing as Hugh's death. Then all this problem vanished and he handed the
child the shilling. She stared at him, inquiring, incredulous. "Is there
a reply, Sir, please?"

"No," he said, "that's for you. All of it.... This is a peculiar sort of
telegram.... It's news of importance...."

As he said this he met her eyes, and had a sudden persuasion that she
knew exactly what it was the telegram had told him, and that she was
shocked at this gala-like treatment of such terrible news. He hesitated,
feeling that he had to say something else, that he was socially
inadequate, and then he decided that at any cost he must get his face
away from her staring eyes. She made no movement to turn away. She
seemed to be taking him in, recording him, for repetition, greedily,
with every fibre of her being.

He stepped past her into the garden, and instantly forgot about her
existence....

Section 22

He had been thinking of this possibility for the last few weeks almost
continuously, and yet now that it had come to him he felt that he had
never thought about it before, that he must go off alone by himself to
envisage this monstrous and terrible fact, without distraction or
interruption.

He saw his wife coming down the alley between the roses.

He was wrenched by emotions as odd and unaccountable as the emotions of
adolescence. He had exactly the same feeling now that he had had when in
his boyhood some unpl