went down. Someone stirred behind her and she turned her head quickly to
see who was there. It was Neale, come in early. He was standing, looking
at her back; and in the instant before he saw that she had turned, she
caught the expression on his face, the tender fathomless affection that
was there.

A warm gush of happiness surged up all over her. She felt a sudden
intense physical well-being, as though her breath came more smoothly,
her blood ran more sweetly in her veins.

"Oh, _Neale_!" she said, under her breath, flushing and turning to him.
He looked at her, his strong, resolute face and clear eyes smiled, and
opening his arms he drew her into them. The ineffable memory of all the
priceless past, the ineffable certainty of the priceless future was in
their kiss.

That evening, after a long golden hour at the piano, she chanced to take
down the Largo in the Chopin sonata. As she began it, something stirred
in her mind, some memory that instantly lived with the first notes of
the music. How thick-clustered with associations music became, waking a
hundred echoes and overtones!

This was the memory of the time when she had played it, almost a year
ago, and had thought how intimacy and familiarity with music but
deepened and enriched and strengthened its hold on you. It was only the
lower pleasures of which one grew tired,--had enough. The others grew
with your growing capacity to hold them. She remembered how that day she
had recalled the Wordsworth sonnet, "A beauteous evening, calm and
free," and had thought that music took you in to worship quite simply
and naturally at the Temple's inner shrine, that you adored none the
less although you were at home there and not breathless with adoration
like the nun: because it was a whole world given to you, not a mere pang
of joy, because you could live and move and be blessedly and securely at
home there.

She finished the last note of the Largo and sat silent. She was thinking
that her marriage was like that, too.

Presently she got up, took out the old portfolio of photographs, and
pinned upon the wall over the piano the view taken from Rocca di Papa.

VII

February 24.

Marise had been drilling the chorus in the Town Hall of Ashley after the
men's working-hours, and now in the dimming light of the early evening
was going home on snow-shoes, over the hill-path. She liked to use
snow-shoes and occasionally said that she could walk more easily and
more lightly o