e extinguished this side of the grave. She brandished her
happiness as if in salute; she dipped it as if in reverence. "How they
burn!" she thought, and all the darkness of London seemed set with
fires, roaring upwards; but her eyes came back to Mary's window and
rested there satisfied. She had waited some time before a figure
detached itself from the doorway and came across the road, slowly and
reluctantly, to where she stood.

"I didn't go in--I couldn't bring myself," he broke off. He had stood
outside Mary's door unable to bring himself to knock; if she had come
out she would have found him there, the tears running down his cheeks,
unable to speak.

They stood for some moments, looking at the illuminated blinds, an
expression to them both of something impersonal and serene in the spirit
of the woman within, working out her plans far into the night--her plans
for the good of a world that none of them were ever to know. Then their
minds jumped on and other little figures came by in procession, headed,
in Ralph's view, by the figure of Sally Seal.

"Do you remember Sally Seal?" he asked. Katharine bent her head.

"Your mother and Mary?" he went on. "Rodney and Cassandra? Old Joan up
at Highgate?" He stopped in his enumeration, not finding it possible to
link them together in any way that should explain the queer combination
which he could perceive in them, as he thought of them. They appeared to
him to be more than individuals; to be made up of many different things
in cohesion; he had a vision of an orderly world.

"It's all so easy--it's all so simple," Katherine quoted, remembering
some words of Sally Seal's, and wishing Ralph to understand that she
followed the track of his thought. She felt him trying to piece together
in a laborious and elementary fashion fragments of belief, unsoldered
and separate, lacking the unity of phrases fashioned by the old
believers. Together they groped in this difficult region, where the
unfinished, the unfulfilled, the unwritten, the unreturned, came
together in their ghostly way and wore the semblance of the complete and
the satisfactory. The future emerged more splendid than ever from this
construction of the present. Books were to be written, and since books
must be written in rooms, and rooms must have hangings, and outside
the windows there must be land, and an horizon to that land, and trees
perhaps, and a hill, they sketched a habitation for themselves upon the
outline of