For some moments after he had finished Alison did not reply.

"What is his number in Dalton Street?" she asked.

Hodder informed her.

He could not read in her face whether she suspected that he could have
told her more. And in spite of an inordinate, human joy in being again
in her presence, his desire to hide from her that which had taken place
within him, and the inability he felt to read his future, were
instinctive: the more so because of the very spontaneity they had
achieved at their first meeting. As a man, he shrank from confessing
to her, however indirectly, the fact that she herself was so vital an
element in his disillusionment. For the conversation in the garden had
been the immediate cause of the inner ferment ending in his resolution to
go away, and had directed him, by logical steps, to the encounter in the
church with Mrs. Garvin.

"You have not yet finished the garden?" he asked. "I imagined you back
in the East by this time."

"Oh, I am procrastinating," she replied. "It is a fit of sheer laziness.
I ought to be elsewhere, but I was born without a conscience. If I had
one I should try to quiet it by reminding it that I am fulfilling a
long-delayed promise--I am making a garden for Mrs. Larrabbee. You know
her, of course, since she is a member of your congregation."

"Yes, I know her," he assented. And his mind was suddenly filled with
vivid colour,--cobalt seas, and arsenic-green spruces with purple cones,
cardinal-striped awnings that rattled in the salt breeze, and he saw once
more the panorama of the life which had passed from him and the woman in
the midst of it. And his overwhelming thought was of relief that he had
somehow escaped. In spite of his unhappiness now, he would not have gone
back. He realized for the first time that he had been nearer
annihilation then than to-day.

"Grace isn't here to bother me with the ideas she has picked up in Europe
and catalogued," Alison continued.

"Catalogued!" Hodder exclaimed, struck by the pertinency of the word.

"Yes. Did you ever know anybody who had succeeded half so well in
piecing together and absorbing into a harmonized whole all the divergent,
artificial elements that enter into the conventional world to-day? Her
character might be called a triumph of synthesis. For she has actually
achieved an individuality--that is what always surprises me when I think
of her. She has put the puzzle picture together, she has become a
person."

He re