In the first stabbing sense of loss he hoped that he had caught the contagion and might die. Life without her was unthinkable. Then, through very excess of grief, his feelings became blunted. It seemed impossible that he would ever again fear or expect.

He moved as in a shadow-world. Time had no significance. Days slipped by uncounted. He was trying to understand life, searching behind the external show for its secret meaning and purpose. Up till now, with the gay generosity of a child, he had shared himself with those whom he loved and by whom he was loved, concentrating and intensifying his affections. Now, dimly at first, he began to view existence from the angle of responsibility, as a river ever broadening and growing more adventurous, pouring down from forgotten highlands to the conjectured sea. It was not his journey that counted; it was the direction and journey of the total river. If he suffered and had been glad, there were multitudes who were glad and had suffered. What was the meaning of it—this alternating sorrow and gladness? For the first time he asked himself how other people thought, felt, endured—people like Jehane and Riska, like the golden woman and Glory.

A month ago, had anyone told him that his sister would be taken from him, he would have defied God by turning infidel. But now——. He realized reluctantly how his very passion for her might have crippled her, shutting out the natural and fine things that belong to every man and woman. In giving her too much, he might have deprived her of what was most splendid, giving her ultimate curtailment. How near he had come to doing this he had learnt from Harry.

Her words were continually recurring in his memory, dragging him back from despondency. “You won’t be bitter—won’t break your heart about me? If you did, I should know. I shouldn’t be happy.” The shame that he might be paining her was always with him. He had the sure knowledge that, though he could not see her, she still lingered in the house. Sitting with closed eyes, especially at twilight, he believed he could hear her moving—moving gladly. The sound was always behind him, even when he turned his head. He placed flowers about her room, pretending she was alive; he liked to picture her surprise when she found them. A white wraith of laughing mist, he imagined he saw her stoop above them. In his mind he heard her voice, “Oh, Peterkins, how good you still are to me!” The wind touched his cheek; it was her mouth.

While her body remained in the house his grief was inconsolable. Yet peace came to him even before the mortal part, long and lily-white, was borne through the sun-swept village to the garden on the hill gazing out to sea, cypress-shadowed and quiet.

Through the first long night he sat beside her, fixing her features, everything that had been her, indelibly in his mind. The swathed feet, immobile as marble beneath the tall candles, brought back her saying, “The joy goes into my feet when I’m glad.”

Wearied by watching, he slept. Again she was dying. He could hear her voice, trying so hard to be patient. Someone entered, bringing a new body, exactly like the old one but well. She rose and slipped into it, just as if she were trying on a new dress. She caught him by the hand, laughing excitedly. In their gladness, as they left the room, neither of them remembered to look back to the bed; they had no pity for the abandoned fleshly garment.

——And was death no more than that to the dead—clothes cast aside, outworn by the spirit? What a little to make a fuss about!

Through the open window dawn was breaking. In a chair Harry slept, his chin fallen forward. Peter rose to his feet and tiptoed over to the still face lying on the pillow, framed in the golden hair. He stood gazing down. The morning wind walked the sea, like the feet of Jesus bringing peace to sinful men. Far back he remembered another early morning when Kay’s eyes had been closed and he had heard those same feet walking—snow had lain on the ground. Another girl, strangely like her, with the same bowed mouth and penciled brows, had been stretched beside her. While Kay’s eyes were shuttered, the other eyes had opened.

As the days went by, the desire grew strong within him to see Glory—he wanted to trace Kay’s likeness in the living features. And yet he postponed.

It was September. Harry had left for London, called back by work. Letters from Topbury implored his own return. He was afraid to abandon scenes familiar; in losing them he might lose the sense of Kay’s spirit presence.

Then to him, as to Harry, came the imperative cry of the need of the world.

A telegram sent from Paris and forwarded on from Topbury reached him. Of all persons it was from the golden woman. It bade him urgently to join her. He took no notice. Another, saying that it was not she who wanted him but someone whom he could help. A third, still more insistent. The first he had suspected; this last was too pleading for insincerity. He packed up and left.

In Paris she met him; even then she refused to tell him why she had sent for him. She was a different golden woman, grave and quiet. The day after his arrival, she took him out to a gray Normandy village. On the train journey she had little to say; only once did she explain herself. A flight of swallows was passing over a meadow going south, moving steadily as a cloud. She met his eyes.

“Yes, I’m different. The stork knoweth her appointed times, and the turtle and the crane and the swallow, but——You remember the passage. I didn’t know mine. I waited too long. Foolish! Foolish!—— The winter came. My appointed time went by me.” And a little later, “Don’t let that happen to you, Peter.”

They walked down a white road and came to a cottage. She knocked. A voice, which he ought to have recognized, told her to enter. Sitting in a low chair, her foot rocking a cradle, was Riska. She rose, overcome with surprise, lowering her face, awaiting his judgment. As he pressed her to him, the baby began to cry. She stooped, picked him up and held him out to Peter.

“Isn’t he sweet?”

The first words she had spoken—spoken without shame or apology, almost with pride! It seemed impossible that a sin which had made a thing so beautiful could need excusing. He met her eyes, reading in them sacrifice. Where was the old Riska, impatient of restraint, eager to catch men, with the petulant, fluttering mouth? The passion which should have destroyed had purified, just as his grief which might have embittered had made him more anxious to help.

On the way to England she told him of Hardcastle. “I got so tired of trying and trying to get married. All the men found out something—father, or my shallowness, or something. I don’t blame them. And all the time, ever since I was a little girl, mother talked about the raft and what happened if a girl didn’t escape from it. I grew desperate and frightened. It was anything to catch a man. And then Roy——. He said he’d marry me in Paris; afterwards he put off and put off. When he’d deserted me, I didn’t like to write. After the baby came——. I don’t know, it may be all wrong, but I wasn’t a bit ashamed of myself. I didn’t write then because I couldn’t bear to think of people despising him. If the golden woman hadn’t met me—— Oh, well, I should have gone on somehow, earning money for baby with my hands.——But, dear Peter, I’m so glad you found me. I never understood you till now.”

At Topbury that first night, after a hurried reference to Kay, they didn’t trust themselves to talk about her. They tortured themselves the more by their reticence. Everything spoke so loudly of her absence. Nan sat with Riska’s child in her arms—the child which should have been unwelcome. It seemed to fill a gap in her life; they all knew what was passing behind her eyes. The evening grew late. She and Riska went slowly up to bed.

Peter turned to his father. For hours he had sat grimly watching the landscape by Cuyp, where the comfortable burgher walked forever unperturbed by the banks of the gray canal.

“Father.”

“Yes.”

“We’re not doing right.”

“Right!” He shrugged his shoulders. His gesture accused God defiantly.

“No, father—not doing right. One of the last things she said was that she’d know and be unhappy if we broke our hearts about her. She does know, and—and I think we’ve been making her sad.”

For a long time his father sat brooding. He stretched out his hand, “Your imagination, Peter—you’ve never outgrown it. But—but we don’t want to make her sad.”

The house was hushed. It was some hours since they had climbed the stairs. He crept out of his room into the one that had been hers. It was the same as when, years ago, they two had shared it. He gazed across the lamp-lit gulf to where Hampstead lay shrouded beneath the night. And he remembered: the moon letting down her silver ladder and bidding him ascend; the windows in streets he had never traversed, which had seemed to watch him like the eyes of cats; the mysterious whistling from the powder-cupboard, “Coming! Coming! Coming!”

He tried, as of old, to eliminate barriers by the magic of imagination. It was true, surely, and he hadn’t grown up. Soon he would hear the angel whistle. On the straight unruffled bed he would see the gentle little body, with the tumbled honey-colored hair.

He forgot his promise not to break his heart about her. Throwing himself down, he knelt beside the pillow, with his empty arms spread out.

A sound! Someone was holding him—someone who, coming on the same errand, had discovered him. “Peterkins! Peterkins, don’t cry.”

His arms went about her neck. “Little mother, it’s long since you called me that. I’m so tired—tired of pretending to be brave and trying to be a man.”

They sent for Jehane next day and the next; at last they had to go and fetch her. Her heart was hard because of the disgrace of what had happened. She spoke with bitterness of her children. Glory’s joining her stepfather at The Winged Thrush she construed as an act of treachery. “A daughter of mine,” she said, “serving in a public-house!” She had given up all hope that Eustace would ever ask her to come to Canada. His infrequent letters had given her to understand tacitly that she was not wanted. Only Moggs was left—a subdued child, a little like Glory. Against disappointment from that quarter Jehane forearmed herself by taking disappointment for granted. Her sense of injustice centered in the paradox that Ocky was happy, despite his mismanagement, while she, after all her painstaking rectitude, was sad.

Throughout the journey to Topbury she insisted vigorously that she would never take Riska back. As she entered the hall of his house, Barrington heard the last repetition of her assertion. “We don’t want you to,” he said; “she and her child are going to live with us.” Then Jehane saw Riska, and recognized the change; promptly she turned her accusals against herself. She had been unwise. She had spoilt her life both as wife and mother. Her calamities were her own doing. She needed Riska—wanted her. “You’ll come with your mother, won’t you?”

Riska shook her head gently—so gently that for a minute she looked like Glory. “Mother dear, I can’t. I would if it were only myself; I’ve baby to consider. You’d do for him just what you’ve done——. You couldn’t help it. I’m going to stay here with Aunt Nan and learn—learn to be like her—like Kay.”

Jehane covered her face with her hands. “I’m a bitter woman—yes, and jealous. But that my own child should tell me—and should be able to say it truly!”

She looked up. “If I were to try to be different, if I could prove to you that I was different——.”

Riska put her arms about her mother’s neck, “That’s all in the future. But, oh, I’m so sorry, so sorry. I know you’ve done your best.”

“My best!” Her voice was full of self-despisings. “Oh, well——!”

She had lost her last illusion—her faith in her own righteousness. Barrington, watching the disillusioned woman, tried to trace in her features the eager face, tell-tale of dreamings, that had beckoned to him from a window on a summer’s afternoon in Oxford. He found no resemblance.

He turned to Riska, who had played life’s game so recklessly, plunging off the raft of maidenhood, swimming and drifting on chance-found débris to the land of maternity, about which her mother was always talking.

In searching Riska’s face he found Jehane’s dreamings come true—self-fulfilment and mastery. Sacrifice, by the road of sin, had accomplished them. He recollected how he had said of her, “Ripe fruit—ready to fall to the ground.” He smiled wisely, remembering his own unwisdom.