's children. But the idea that having come into this
neighbourhood of fine appreciations he was to take up his home and live
there, opened more slowly. It required more than one of Clarice's swift
hummingbird darts, more than the flutter of suggestion to brush its
petals awake for him.

It lay so deep under all the years, the power of loving. He knew almost
nothing about it except that he had had it once, and that marriage
without it would be unthinkable, even such a marriage as Mrs. Lessing
had let him see was now possible to him. She had called with all her
delicate friendly skill, on something which only now under that summons
he began to miss. It was like a lost word in every sentence in which the
ordinary hopes of men are to be read, and he felt that until he found it
again all the help Mrs. Lessing could afford him would not enable him to
think of marriage as a thing desirable in itself. It was missing in him
still, when he came that night rather late to the apartment where only
the Japanese houseboy awaited him. One of the first things he had done
for Ellen with his increasing means, had been to buy back for her the
house at Bloombury with the garden and a bit of the orchard. She had
been there now since Decoration Day, retiring more and more into the
kindly village life as a point of vantage from which to mark with pride
the social distance that Peter travelled from her. It had been
understood from the beginning that she wasn't to go with him. The
tapping of her crutch was no more to be heard in the new gracious
existence than in the House where she had never followed him. Life for
Ellen was lived close at hand. There were hollyhocks and currant bushes
in her garden and Julian's children overran it.

It was not Ellen then that Peter missed as he sat alone in the house
that night with his back to the lowered light and his gaze seeking the
river and the flitting shapes of boats that went up and down on it,
freighted with young voices and laughter. He missed the Lovely Lady. He
knew now why he had not been able to think of marriage in the way
Clarice held it out to him, as a happy contingency of his now being as
rich as he had intended to be. It was because he had not thought of her
clearly for a long time.

There had been a period in the beginning of his life with Ellen, when
the lady of his dreams had been so near the surface of all his thinking
that she took on form and likeness from anything that was lovely a