he began
his walk home. He was not running now, but aware of a physical
discomfort that was not mere exhaustion. He had a sharp pain in his side
such as children call a stitch, but no amount of stooping to tie
imaginary shoelaces would drive it away. He was glad to accept the offer
of a lift home when he was overtaken by a farmer's cart, and as he was
jogged along the pain grew fiercer. By the time he reached Cloom the
splendid fire that had warmed him on his run had died to nothingness,
and at his ashen look Georgie cried out. He allowed her to help him to
bed and give him hot drinks, to scold him in her woman's way.

"Such a foolish thing to do at your age ... you might have known!" she
kept on repeating. He said little, but in his own mind ran the refrain:
"She doesn't understand. She's still too young...." He wondered whether
women ever really did know when talking was a mere foolishness, however
sensible the thing said. And again, over and over to himself, as an
accompaniment even to his pain, ran: "How well worth it ...!" For he had
recaptured for a magic couple of hours something he had thought left
behind him, had burned with it ardently and secretly. He too had been a
body of fire.

The phrase stayed, pricking at him, through the drifting veils of sleep
that alternately deepened and thinned about him all night long.

CHAPTER IV

THE NEW JUDITH

For a long time Ishmael paid the price of that night raid upon his
physical resources, and when he was beginning to take up work again, as
usual, Nicky was off to Canada--off with the latest thing in outfits,
letters of introduction, high hopes, and such excitement at thought of
the new world at his feet that only at the last moment did the sorrow
that because of the uncertainty of life all leave takings hold, strike
him. Then--for he was a very affectionate boy--he felt tears of which he
was deeply ashamed burning in his eyes; he ignored them, made his
farewells briefer, and was gone.

A few days later Judith came down to pay her promised visit. Both
Ishmael and Georgie drove over to meet her train, and both failed for
the first startled moment to recognise her. Ishmael had an incongruous
flash, during which that occasion years earlier when he had seen her and
Georgie walking down that same platform towards him was the more vivid
actuality.

Judith's epicene thinness had become gaunt, but it was not that so much
as the colouring of her face and the fact