since I sat down with roses on the
table."

"I never have before," said Ellen.

II

It was indeed much more as the friend that Ellen wanted than as the
declared lover he had intended to be that Yaverland came to Hume Park
Square on Saturday in answer to the letter of thanks which, after the
careful composition of eight drafts, she had sent him. All week he had
meant to ask her to marry him at the first possible moment. By day, when
the thought of her rushed in upon him like a sweet-smelling wind every
time he lifted his mind from his work, and by night, when she stood
red-gold and white on every wall of his room in the darkness, it grew
more and more incredible that he could meet her and not tell her that he
wanted to spend all the rest of his life with her. He felt ashamed that
he was not her husband, and at the back of his mind was a confused
consciousness of inverted impropriety, as if continuance in his present
course would bring upon him denunciations from the pulpit for living in
open chastity apart from a woman to whom he was really married. There
was, too, a strange sense of a severer guilt, as if by not letting his
love for her have its way he was committing the crime a scientific man
commits when he fails to communicate the result of a valuable research.
Even when he went out to mount his motor-cycle for the ride to Edinburgh
he meant to force on her at once as much knowledge of his love as her
youth could hold.

But going down the garden he met the postman, who gave him a letter;
and before he opened it it checked his enterprise. For the address was
in his mother's handwriting, and though it was still black and
exquisite, like the tracery of bare tree-boughs against the sky, it was
larger than usual, and he had often before noticed that she wrote like
that only when her eyes had been strained by one of her bouts of
sleeplessness. "Why doesn't she go to a doctor and get him to give her
something for it?" he asked himself impatiently, annoyed at the casting
of this shadow on his afternoon; but it struck him what a lovely and
characteristic thing it was that, though his mother had suffered great
pain from sleeplessness for thirty years, she had never bought peace
with a drug. Nothing would make her content to tamper with reality. He
found, too, in her letter a phrase that bore out his suspicion, a
complaint of the length of the winter, a confessed longing for his
return in the New Year, which was a breac