om these hollows he came up again as a man comes
floating into consciousness after chloroform--recalled by a sense of
pain. He had one of these spaces just after Vassie had been buried, and
all the time he was consoling Dan's frantic and noisy sorrow he was
feeling a hypocrite, because, so he told himself, he really did not
care. He did care, and deeply, but he was making the mistake of thinking
that any grief can go the whole way, that all else in life can possibly
be blotted out. True instinct told him it could not, that all of life
could never fall in ashes round the head even when it was bowed in
irrevocable loss; but a remnant of the conventional made him feel as
though it ought to, and this made him distrust what grief he felt. His
thought for Nicky, even when he was in his dry spaces, he always knew
was eating at him. When, with peace, came the expectation of Nicky's
return in safety, it seemed to Ishmael that never before had he known
all that fatherhood meant. Cloom, the future, all that he had worked for
all his life, would surely come back with Nicky.

CHAPTER VII

EARTH

"When Nicky comes home" grew to be the watchword in the household at
Cloom. The two girls, clever Lissa and thoughtful Ruth, were now grown
up, and far from the childish griefs of postponed drives; they had built
up a very pretty legend round the figure of Nicky these three years of
the war. Ruth had copied out his letters from South Africa and made a
manuscript book of them, that Lissa, who was "going in" for
craftsmanship, bound in khaki with the badge of the D.C.L.I. on the
cover, and they gave it to their father with great pomp. All of life
centred round "when Nicky comes home." He had done very well, having
gained a commission and won a D.S.O., and there was talk of a public
reception in Penzance for him and the rest of the local heroes.

One day Nicky came home, but with a wife, and the homecoming was
consequently quite unlike everything that had been planned. The girls
declared loudly that he had spoilt everything and that they had wanted
him to themselves, though privately Ruth thought Marjorie very
fascinating.

Marjorie was a Colonial by birth--a good-looking, vigorous modern young
woman, with a rather twangy voice. She admired Cloom so much as an
antique that her enthusiasm seemed somehow to belittle it. Yet there was
something splendid about her--in her confidence and poise, her candour,
her superb health, and the s