rring to the frequent, the very frequent
incursions of his family.

"You mustn't let them. You must harden your heart."

"It isn't they. It isn't anybody."

"What is it then?"

"Only that everything's different. I'm different."

He regarded her for a long time. She _was_ different. It was part of her
queerness, this capacity she had for being different. He could see
nothing now but her wild fawn look, the softness and the flush of life.
It was his miracle on her.

He remained silent, brooding over it. In the stillness she could hear
his deep breathing; she could just discern his face, heavy but tender.

"It doesn't mean that you're not well, Jinny?" He remembered that once
or twice since he had known her it had meant that.

She smiled. "Oh no, not that."

"It doesn't make you unhappy?"

"No, not if--if it wasn't for that you cared."

"You know it wasn't."

She knew. She had always known it.

They sat silent a long time. Round and about them Brodrick's garden
slept, enchanted in darkness. Phantasmal, blanched by the dark, his
flowers dreamed on the lawn. An immense tenderness filled her for
Brodrick and all things that were his.

At last they rose and went hand in hand, slowly, through the garden
towards the house.

Her state was bliss; and yet, through it all she had a sense of
estrangement from herself, and of things closing round her.

XXXV

This sense came sharply to her one late afternoon in July. She was
sitting out in the garden, watching Brodrick as he went his slow and
happy rounds. Now and then he paused and straightened a border, or
propped some untended plant, top-heavy with bloom, or pinned back some
wild arm of a climbing rose flung out to pluck at him as he went by. He
could not but be aware that since Gertrude Collett left there had been
confusion and disorder in the place she had made perfect.

In these hours of innocent absorption he was oblivious of Jane who
watched him.

The garden was still, with that stillness that earth takes at sunsets
following hot days; stillness of grass-plots flooded by flat light;
stillness of trees and flowers that stand fixed, held by the light,
divinely vivid. Jane's vision of her surroundings had never been so
radiant and intense. Yet in a moment, by some impenetrable way, her
thoughts had wandered back to her solitude in Kensington Square. She saw
herself sitting in her room. She was dressed in an old gown that she had
worn two years ago