ossomed with
a thousand varied gaieties and excitements. He was actually to see
Cassandra within a week or perhaps less, and he was more anxious to know
the date of her arrival than he could own even to himself. It seemed
base to be so anxious to pluck this fruit of Katharine's unexampled
generosity and of his own contemptible baseness. And yet, though he used
these words automatically, they had now no meaning. He was not debased
in his own eyes by what he had done, and as for praising Katharine,
were they not partners, conspirators, people bent upon the same quest
together, so that to praise the pursuit of a common end as an act of
generosity was meaningless. He took her hand and pressed it, not in
thanks so much as in an ecstasy of comradeship.

"We will help each other," he said, repeating her words, seeking her
eyes in an enthusiasm of friendship.

Her eyes were grave but dark with sadness as they rested on him. "He's
already gone," she thought, "far away--he thinks of me no more." And
the fancy came to her that, as they sat side by side, hand in hand, she
could hear the earth pouring from above to make a barrier between
them, so that, as they sat, they were separated second by second by
an impenetrable wall. The process, which affected her as that of being
sealed away and for ever from all companionship with the person she
cared for most, came to an end at last, and by common consent they
unclasped their fingers, Rodney touching hers with his lips, as the
curtain parted, and Mrs. Hilbery peered through the opening with her
benevolent and sarcastic expression to ask whether Katharine could
remember was it Tuesday or Wednesday, and did she dine in Westminster?

"Dearest William," she said, pausing, as if she could not resist the
pleasure of encroaching for a second upon this wonderful world of love
and confidence and romance. "Dearest children," she added, disappearing
with an impulsive gesture, as if she forced herself to draw the curtain
upon a scene which she refused all temptation to interrupt.

CHAPTER XXV

At a quarter-past three in the afternoon of the following Saturday
Ralph Denham sat on the bank of the lake in Kew Gardens, dividing the
dial-plate of his watch into sections with his forefinger. The just and
inexorable nature of time itself was reflected in his face. He might
have been composing a hymn to the unhasting and unresting march of that
divinity. He seemed to greet the lapse of minute afte