awhile; and when it does happen I'm
confident enough that something else will have happened meanwhile and
that he'll see, and thank God for it, that what is is best. There'll be
another thing too. He'll find his wife has married again. Yes, fact! I
heard in a roundabout way that she's going to marry an old neighbour of
theirs, chap called Major Millett, Hopscotch Millett, old Sabre used to
call him. However, that's not the thing--though it would be a
complication--that I mean will have happened and will make him see, and
thank God for, that what is is best. What do I mean? What will have
happened meanwhile? Well, that's telling; and I don't feel it's quite
mine to tell. Tell you what, you come around and have a look at the old
chap to-morrow. I dare bet he'll be on the road towards it by then and
perhaps tell us himself. As I was coming away yesterday I passed that
Lady Tybar going in, and I told her what I'd been saying to him and what
he remembered and what he didn't remember.... What's that got to do with
it? Well, you wait and see, my boy. You wait and see. I'll tell you
this--come on, let's be getting off to this play or we'll be late--I
tell you this, it's my belief of old Sabre that, after all he's been
through,

"Home is the sailor, home from the sea
And the hunter home from the hill.

Or jolly soon will be. And good luck to him. He's won out."

II

Sabre, after Hapgood on the visit on which he had begun "to tell him
things", had left him, was sitting propped up in bed awaiting who next
might come. The nurse had told him he was to have visitors that morning.
He sat as a man might sit at daybreak, brooding down upon a valley
whence slowly the veiling mists dissolved. These many days they had been
lifting; there were becoming apparent to him familiar features about the
landscape. He was as one returned after long absence to his native
village and wondering to find forgotten things again, paths he had
walked, scenes he had viewed, places and people left long ago and still
enduring here. More than that: he was to go down among them.

The door opened and one came in. Nona.

She said to him, "Marko!"

He had no reply that he could make.

She slipped off a fur that she was wearing and came and sat down beside
him. She wore what he would have thought of as a kind of waistcoat
thing, cut like his own waistcoats but short; and opened above like a
waistcoat but turned back in a white rolled edging, rev