octor than this man,
who affected her with a faint nausea when he looked at her, though he
seldom did so.

2

Windover too was illumined. She could watch almost calmly Neville talking
to Grandmama, wheeling her round the garden to look at the borders, for
Grandmama was a great gardener.

Then Jim came down for a week-end, and it was as if the sun had risen on
Surrey. He sat with Mrs. Hilary in the arbour. She told him about Dr.
Evans and the other psycho-analyst doctor at St. Mary's Bay. He frowned
over Dr. Evans, who lived in the same street as he did.

"Rosalind sent you to him; of course; she would. Why didn't you ask me,
mother? He's a desperate Freudian, you know, and they're not nearly so
good as the others. Besides, this particular man is a shoddy scoundrel,
I believe.... Was he offensive?"

"I wouldn't let him be, Jim. I was prepared for that. I ... I changed the
conversation."

Jim laughed, and did his favourite trick with her hand, straightening the
thin fingers one by one as they lay across his sensitive palm. How happy
it always made her!

"Well," he said, "I daresay this man down at the Bay is all right. I'll
find out if he's any good or not.... They talk a lot of tosh, you know,
mother; you'll have to sift the grain from the chaff."

But he saw that her eyes were interested, her face more alert than usual,
her very poise more alive. She had found a new interest in life, like
keeping a parrot, or learning bridge, or getting religion. It was what
they had always tried to find for her in vain.

"So long," he said, "as you don't believe more than half what they tell
you.... Let me know how it goes on, won't you, and what this man is like.
If I don't approve I shall come and stop it."

She loved that from Jim.

"Of course, dearest. Of course I shall tell you about it. And I know one
must be careful."

It was something to have become an object for care; it put one more in
the foreground. She would have gone on willingly with the subject, but
Jim changed her abruptly for Neville.

"Neville's looking done up."

She felt the little sharp pang which Neville's name on Jim's lips had
always given her. His very pronunciation of it hurt her--"Nivvle," he
said it, as if he had been an Irishman. It brought all the past back;
those two dear ones talking together, studying together, going off
together, bound by a hundred common interests, telling each other things
they never told her.

"Yes. It's this