MISS LATIMER did not come to dinner and he was thankful for it, though there was little to be thankful for, he felt, as he sat in the library afterwards and wondered what Tony was thinking of there in the darkness above him, if she were alone and in the dark. The thought that she was not, the thought that Miss Latimer, with her stone-curlew eyes and pallid, brooding face, was with her made him restless. He could not read. He threw his book aside and stared into the fire.

Next morning the rain had ceased and it was cold and sunny. He found Miss Latimer in the dining-room when he went down. She was already dressed for going out and had started her breakfast. “My poor friend in the village is dying,” she said, “and has asked for me. I have a message to you from Antonia. She is still resting this morning, but will come down at three, if you will be in the library then.”

Her courteous terseness put barriers between them; but none were needed. He could not have asked questions or appealed this morning. He imagined, though he had looked at his face in the mirror with unregarding eyes, that he, too, was perceptibly aged, and his main feeling about Miss Latimer was that she was old and ugly and that he was sick of her.

After breakfast he went out into the hard, bright air.

He walked about the grounds and found himself looking at the house with consciously appraising eyes, from the lawn, from the ring-court, from the kitchen-garden. It was a solid, tasteful, graceful structure; mild, with its sunny faÇade looking to the moors; cheerful, with its gable-ends; but as he had felt it at the first he felt it now more decisively as empty of tradition and tenderness. It had remained, too, so singularly new; perhaps because, in its exposed situation, none of the trees carefully disposed about it had yet grown to a proportionate height. Yes, notwithstanding the passion and grief now burning within its walls, it was impersonal, unlovable; and it would need centuries, in spite of the care and love lavished upon it, to gain a soul.

He knew, as he walked, that he was taking comfort from these reflections and was vexed that he should need them. He had completely placed, psychologically, if not scientifically, the events of the other evening, and it was not necessary that he should be satisfied that Wyndwards was a place to which the supernatural could not attach itself. Yet that desire, indubitably, directed his wanderings, and he could compute its power by the strength of the reluctance he felt for visiting the flagged garden where, if anywhere, the element he thankfully missed might lurk. But when, putting an ironic compulsion upon himself, he had entered the little enclosure, his main impression, as before, was one of mere beauty. It was the only corner of Wyndwards that had achieved individuality; the placing of the fountain, the stone bench, the beds among the flags, was a pleasure to the eye. And like a harbinger of good cheer, he heard, from the branches of the budding wood beyond the garden wall, the wiry, swinging notes of a chiff-chaff, and his own soul as well as the flagged garden seemed exorcised by that assured and reiterated gladness. Ghosts, in a world where chiff-chaffs sang, were irrelevancies, even if they walked. And they did not walk. In sunlight as in moonlight he found the flagged garden empty.

He sat down on the stone bench for a little while and watched the fountain and listened to the chiff-chaff, while he lighted a cigarette and told himself that the day was pleasant. With reiteration the bird’s monotonous little utterance lost its special message for him and dropped to an accompaniment to thoughts that, if unhaunted, were not happy, in spite of the pleasant day. He felt that he hated silent, sunny Wyndwards. He cursed the impulse that had brought Antonia there, and him after her. It had seemed at the time the most natural of things that his young widowed friend should ask him to pay her a spring visit in her new home. His courtship of her, laconic, implicit, patient, had prolonged itself through the dreary London winter following the Armistice, and springtime on the moors had seemed full of promise to his hopes. Alas! why had they not stayed in safe, dear, dingy London, London of tubes and shops and theatres, of people and clever tea- and dinner-tables? There one lived sanely in the world of the normal consciousness, one’s personality hedged round by activity and convention from the vagrant and disintegrating influences of the subliminal, or the subconscious, whichever it might have been that had infernally played the trick of the other evening. He sat there, poking with his stick at the crevices between the flags, and the song of the chiff-chaff was his only comfort.

Miss Latimer did not return to lunch, and he was in the library waiting for Tony long before the appointed hour. She came before it struck, softly and suddenly entering, turning without a pause to close the door behind her, not looking at him as she went to the fire and leaned there, her hand upon the mantelpiece. She was dressed in black, a flowing gown with wide sleeves that invested her with an unfamiliar, invalided air; but her hair was beautifully wreathed and she wore her little high-heeled satin shoes, tying about the instep. For a moment she stood looking down into the fire; then, as she raised her face, he saw the change in her.

“Why, Tony,” he said gently, “you look very ill.”

Her eyes only met his for a moment and, instinctively, he kept the distance they measured.

“I’m not very well,” she said. “I haven’t been able to sleep. Not for these two nights.”

“Not at all?”

“Not at all.”

“Don’t take drugs,” he said after a moment. “Miss Latimer tells me that you take drugs. I didn’t know it.”

“It’s very seldom,” she said, with a faint, deprecatory smile. “I’m very careful.”

Still he felt that he could not approach her, and it was with a sense of the unmeet, or at all events the irrelevant, that he helplessly fell back on verbal intimacy. “You could, I am sure, sleep in the train to-night; with me to look after you.”

She said nothing to this for a moment, but then replied, as though she had really thought it over: “Not to-night; Cicely won’t get back in time. Her poor woman is dying; she couldn’t leave her. But to-morrow; I intend to go to-morrow; with Cicely.”

“Leaving me here?” he enquired, with something of his own dryness, so that, again with the faint, defensive smile, she said: “Oh—you must come with us; we will all go together; as far as London. We are going down to Cornwall, Bevis, to some cousins of Cicely’s near Fowey.”

He came then, after a little silence, and leaned at the other end of the mantelpiece. “What’s the matter, Tony?” he asked. He had not, in his worst imaginings, imagined this. She had never before spoken as though they were, definitely, to go different ways. And she stood looking down into the fire as if she could not meet his eyes. “You see,” he said, but he felt it to be useless, “I was right about that wretched table business. It’s that that has made you ill.”

“Yes; it’s because of that,” she said.

“You must let me talk to you about it,” he went on. “I can explain it all, I think.”

“It is explained,” she said. Her voice was cold and gentle, cold, it seemed to him, with the immensity of some blank vastness of distance that divided them. And a cold presage fell upon him, of what he could not say; or would not.

“You would not explain it as I would,” he said. “You must listen to me and not to Miss Latimer.”

“It is all explained, Bevis,” she repeated. “It was true. What it said was true.”

“How do you mean, true?” he asked, and he heard the presage in his voice.

“He is there,” she said, and now he knew why she was far from him, and what the stillness was that wrapped her round. “He comes. Cicely has seen him. She saw him there that night. Beside the fountain.”

It was, he saw it now, what he had expected, and his heart stood still to hear it. Then he said: “You mean that she tells you she sees him; that she thinks she sees him; since he’s come just as you led her to expect he would, and just where.”

She shook her head gently and her downcast face kept its curious, considering look. “It wasn’t I, nor you, nor Cicely. He was with us. We could see nothing, you and I. He could not show himself to us; we had put ourselves too far from him. But when we left her alone, Cicely went to the window and saw him standing in the moonlight. He was not looking up at her, but down at the fritillaries. She and he planted them there together, before we were married. And all the while she looked, he stayed there, not moving and plainly visible. I knew it. I knew he was there when I looked, although I could see nothing.” She spoke with an astonishing and terrifying calm.

“And she came at once and told you this? That night?”

“Not that night. She went down into the garden. She thought he might speak to her. But he was gone. And when she came back and looked from the window, he was gone. No; it was next morning she told me. She tried not to tell; but I made her.”

“Curious,” said Bevis after a silence, “that she could have talked to me yesterday afternoon, and given me my tea, as if all this had never happened.” But he knew as he spoke that it had not been so with Miss Latimer. Something had happened; he had seen it when she was with him; and he now knew what it had been.

Gibes and scepticism fell as idly upon Antonia as faint rain. She was unaware of them. “No; she would never speak to you about it. There was no surprise in it for her, Bevis. She has always felt him there. When we went to the window she thought that we should surely see him, and when we did not, she pretended to sleep, purposely, so that we should go and leave her to look out. It comforted her to see him. It was only for me she was frightened.”

“Yes; I rather suspected that,” he muttered. “That she was shamming. I didn’t want to leave her there alone.”

“You couldn’t have kept her from him always, Bevis,” Antonia said gently. “If it had not been then, she would have seen him last night, I am sure; because I am sure he intended her to see him, meant and longed for it. But it was only the one time. Last night he was not there.”

He left the fire and took a turn or two up and down the room. His thoughts were divided against themselves. Did he feel, now, when, after all, the worst had happened, less fear, or more, than he had felt? Did he believe that Miss Latimer had lied? Did he believe Malcolm had appeared to her? And if Malcolm had, in very truth, appeared, did it make any difference? After all, what difference did it make?

“Tony,” he said presently, and really in a tone of ordinary argument, “you say it was only for you she was frightened. What frightened her, for you?”

She thought this over for a little while. “Wasn’t it natural?” she said at last. “She knew how I should feel it.”

“In what way feel it?”

“She knew that until then I had not really believed him still existing,” said Antonia, with her cold, downcast face. “Not as she believed it; not even as you did. She knew what it must mean.”

“That when you really believed, it must part us?”

“Not only that. Perhaps that, alone, would not have parted us. But that he should come back.”

Still she did not look at him, and he continued to limp up and down, his eyes, also, downcast. He, too, was seeing Malcolm standing there, beside the fountain, as he had seen him when first Antonia had told him of her fear. He had visualized her thoughts on that first day; and though, while they sat at the table, he had not remembered Tony’s fear, it had doubtless been its doubled image that had printed itself from their minds upon Miss Latimer’s clairvoyant brain. But now, seeing his dead friend, as he always thought of him, the whole and happy creature, a painful memory suddenly assailed him, challenging this peaceful picture of Malcolm’s ghost; and he was aware, as it came, as he dwelt on it, of a stir of hope, a tightening of craft, in his veins and along his nerves. Subtlety, after all, might serve better than flesh and blood. This, he was sure, was a memory not till then recalled at Wyndwards; and it might strangely help him.

“Tony, how was Malcolm dressed when she saw him?” he asked.

“In his uniform.” He had avoided looking at her in asking his question, but he heard from her voice that she suspected nothing. “As he must have been when he was killed.”

As he must have been when he was killed. Tony had played into his hands.

“Bareheaded, or with his cap?”

She did not answer at once, and, raising his eyes, he saw that now she was looking at him. “Bareheaded. Yes,” she assented. And she repeated, “As he was when he was killed, Bevis.”

“Did he look pale?—unhappy?”

“Very calm,” she said.

“Nothing more?” He had his reasons; but, alas, she had hers.

Her eyes dwelt on him as she answered: “Yes. Something more. Something I did not know. Something Cicely did not know.” She measured what he kept from her, with what a depth of melancholy, seeing his hope; as he, abandoning hope, measured what she had, till then, kept from him. “They told me that Malcolm was shot through the heart, Bevis. It was not only that. I don’t know why they felt it kinder to say that. They told you the truth. There was something more. You do know,” she said. Her eyes were on his and he could not look away, though he felt, sickening him, that a dull flush crept revealingly to his face.

“I know what?” he repeated, stupidly.

“How he was killed. That’s what Cicely saw.”

“She got it from my mind,” he muttered, while the flush, that felt like an exposure of guilt, dyed his face and, despite his words, horror settled round his heart. “She’s a clairvoyante. She got the khaki from us both and the wound in the head from me.”

Now her eyes dropped from him. He had revealed nothing to her, except his own hope of escape. He had brought further evidence; but it was not needed. She was a creature fixed and frozen in an icy block of certainty.

“A wound in the head,” she repeated. “A terrible wound. That was what Cicely saw. He must have died at once. How did you know, Bevis? You were not with him.”

“Alan Chichester told me,” said the young man hoarsely. “The other was true too. The shot in the breast would have been enough to kill him. It was instantaneous; the most merciful death. And he was not disfigured, Tony.”

She rested pitying eyes upon him. She pitied him. “His features were not touched; not on the side he turned to her,” she answered. “But Cicely saw that half his head was shot away.”

His busy mind, while they spoke, was nimbly darting here and there with an odd, agile avoidance of certain recognitions. This was the moment of moments in which to show no fear. And his mind was not afraid.—Clairvoyance; clairvoyance; it repeated, while the horror clotted round his heart. As if pushing against a weight he forced his will through the horror and went back to his place at the other end of the mantelpiece; and, with a conscious volition, he put his hand on hers and drew it from the shelf. “Tony dear,” he said, “come sit down. Let us talk quietly.”—Heaven knew they had been quiet enough!—“Here; let me keep beside you. Don’t take your hand away. I shan’t trouble you. Listen, dear. Even if it were true, even if Malcolm came—and I do not believe he comes—it need not mean that we must part.”

She had suffered him to draw her down beside him on the leathern divan and, as she felt his kindly hand upon her and heard his voice, empty of all but an immense gentleness, tears, for the first time, rose to her eyes. Slowly they fell down her cheeks and she sat there, mute, and let them fall.

“Why should you think it means he wants to part us?” he asked in a gentle and exhausted voice. He asked, for he must still try to save himself and Tony; yet he knew that Miss Latimer had indeed done something to him; or that Malcolm had. The wraith of that inscrutability hovered between him and Tony, and in clasping her would he not always clasp its chill? The springs of ardour in his heart were killed. Never had he more loved and never less desired her. Poor, poor Tony. How could she live without him? And wretched he, how was he to win her back from this antagonist?

He had asked his question, but she knew his thoughts.

“He has parted us, Bevis. We are parted. You know it, too.”

“I don’t! I don’t!” Holding her hand he looked down at it while his heart mocked the protestation. “I don’t know it. Life can cover this misery. We must be brave, and face it together.”

“It can’t be faced together. He would be there, always. Seeing us.”

“We want him to be there; happy; loving you; loving your happiness.”

“It is not like that, Bevis.” She only needed to remind him. The reality before them mocked his words. “He would not have called to us if he were happy. He would not have appeared to Cicely. He is not angry. I understand it all. He is trying to get through, but it is not because he is angry. It is because he feels I have gone from him. He is lonely, Bevis; and lost. Like the curlew. Like the poor, forgotten curlew.”

When she said that, something seemed to break in his heart, if there were anything left to break. He sat for a little while, still looking down at the hand he held, the piteous, engulfed hand. But it was a pity not only for her, but for himself, and, unendurably, for Malcolm, in that vision she evoked, that brought the slow tears to his eyes. And then thought and feeling seemed washed away from him and he knew only that he had laid his head upon her shoulder, as if in great weariness, and sobbed.

“Oh, my darling!” whispered Tony. She put her arms around him. “Oh, my darling Bevis. I’ve broken your heart, too. Oh, what grief! What misery!”

She had never spoken to him like that before; never clasped him to her. He had a beautiful feeling of comfort and contentment, even while, with her, he felt the waters closing over their heads.

“Darling Tony,” he said. He added after a moment, “My heart’s not broken when you are so lovely to me.”

Pressing her cheek against his forehead, kissing him tenderly, she held him as a mother holds her child. “I’d give my life for you,” she said. “I’d die to make you happy.”

“Ah, but you see,” he put his hand up to her shoulder so that he should feel her more near, “that wouldn’t do any good. You must stay like this to make me happy.”

“If I could!” she breathed.

They sat thus for a long time and, in the stillness, sweetness, sorrow, he felt that it was he and Tony who lay drowned in each other’s arms at the bottom of the sea, dead and peaceful, and Malcolm who lived and roved so restlessly, in the world from which they were mercifully sunken. They were the innocent ghosts and he the baleful, living creature haunting their peace.

“Don’t go. Why do you go?” he said, almost with terror, as Antonia’s arms released him. She had opened her eyes; but not to him. Their cold, fixed grief gazed above his head. And the faint, deprecatory smile flickered about her mouth as, rising, she said: “I must. Cicely will soon be back. And I must rest again. I must rest for to-morrow, Bevis dear.”

“We are all going away together? You will really rest?”

“All going away. Yes; I will rest.” Still she did not look at him, but around at the room. “I shall never see Wyndwards again.”

“Forget it, Tony, and all it’s meant. That’s what I am going to do. I am to travel with you?”

She hesitated; then, “Of course. You and I and Cicely,” she said.

“And I may see you in London? You’ll take a day or two there before going on?”

“A day or two, perhaps. But you must not try to see me, Bevis dear.” He had risen, still keeping her hand as he went with her to the door, still feeling himself the bereft and terrified child who seeks pretexts so that its mother shall not leave it. And he thought, as they went so together, that their lives were strangely overturned since this could be; for until now Tony had been his child. It had been he who had sustained and comforted Tony.

“Why do you go?” he repeated. “You can rest with me here: not saying anything; only being quiet, together.”

“No, Bevis dear; no.” She shook her head slowly, and her face was turned away from him. “We must not be together now.”

He knew that it was what she must say. He knew the terror in her heart. He saw Malcolm, mourning, unappeased, between them. Yet, summoning his will, summoning the claim of life against that detested apparition, expressing, also, the sickness of his heart as he saw his devastated future, “You mustn’t make me a lonely curlew, too,” he said.

He was sorry for the words as soon as he had uttered them. It was a different terror they struck from her sunken face. She stood for a moment and looked at him and he remembered how she had looked the other day—oh! how long ago it seemed—when he had frightened her by saying he might get over her. But it was not his child who looked at him now. “I have broken your heart! I have broken your heart, too!” she said.

“Far from it!” he declared. And he tried to smile at her. “Wait till I get you safely to London. You’ll see how it will revive!”

The door stood open between them, and it was not his child who looked at him, answering his sally with a smile as difficult as his own. “Dear, brave Bevis,” she murmured.

And, as she turned and left him, he saw again the love that had cherished him so tenderly, faltering, helpless, at the threshold of her lips and eyes.