huge in the crowded
little drawing-room. And all this had been achieved, whispered Mrs.
Medhurst confidentially in his ear, by the outlay of an incredibly few
pounds.

Morgan had an enchanted couple of hours, handling the books, listening
to Margaret's playing, and admiring Diana's skill with the mandoline,
which her many-sided caprice had taken up of late. He joined them in
their evening meal for, according to their rural regime, they dined at
two and supped about nine. The dining-room opened direct into a third
inner room, which mysterious place Morgan judged to be a kitchen; for
the cottage was built long and low.

When eventually he rose to go, they bade him good-night with the same
implication of normality. It almost seemed they were taking it for
granted he would come again on the morrow. But he knew their omission
to give him a definite invitation was dictated by their feeling for
him; that they did not wish to seem to intrude on the life he had
chosen, but were leaving it to him to decide.

He strode off through the gathering darkness on the hour's walk that
would take him back to Dover. The colour had not quite died out of the
west, and, as he watched the violets and the cold blues and the pearl
greys fading with the strange, lingering light on the distant horizon,
his feeling of the evening just passed brought back to him the echo of
some lines in the poem, from which Helen had once quoted to him:

"It lies in heaven, across the flood
Of ether, as a bridge.
Beneath, the tides of day and night
With flame and darkness ridge
The void..."

He had the sensation of being in the middle spaces now, floating down
towards earth again from some rare ethereal region, to which his
spirit had mounted.

Perhaps, too, of Margaret might it be true, as of the Blessed Damozel:

"... she cast her arms along
The golden barriers,
And laid her face between her hands
And wept."

He recalled now what his father had written in his first letter about
her shutting herself up in her studio and her pretence of being at
work on a mass of wax. The hint of her suffering had been almost
intolerable to him then; and he knew that, in spite of all her gaiety
to-night, the wound had not healed. He pictured the four of them
sitting in the shaded lamp-light of the little drawing-room, and, as
the echo of the music she had played surged again in his ears, he
seemed to feel behind i