THE next morning, Monday, towards eleven o’clock, Sally dropped expertly off the municipal tram, without waiting for it to stop, at the second turn on the right past the Brewery, along the suburban end of the Corfield Road, and entered a street that she had never seen before.

Torrington Avenue was one of those thoroughfares on the edge of large cities that seem to spring into being in a day and a night. In spite of the obvious haste with which its small houses had been flung together it was not unpleasing. But when Sally was last in her native city, a year before the war, this area had been a market garden.

Number Fourteen was a well kept little dwelling in the middle of a neat row. Just as Sally reached it, an old woman with a wicker shopping basket came out of the iron gate.

“Mrs. Nixey?”

The visitor had recognized the old lady but the converse did not hold true.

“You don’t remember me, Mrs. Nixey. I’m Sally Munt.”

The old lady gave vent to surprise, pleasure, incredulity. But even then she was not able to identify one who but a few years ago had been almost as familiar to her as her own son until Sally had lifted her cap and rolled back the fur collar of her immense khaki overcoat.

“Well, I never!” The old woman’s voice was shrill and excited. “It is Miss Munt. I am pleased to see you, my dear.” The distinguished visitor suddenly received a peck on a firm brown cheek. “He knows all about you. I read him the account of the doings at the Floral Hall. He wanted to be there, but the Doctor thought it wouldn’t be good for him. It is kind of you to come and see him.... It’ll please him so.”

Sally cut the old lady short with a brief, pointed question or two. He was very well in health except that he couldn’t see, but he was always telling his mother that he was quite sure he would be able to see presently, although Dr. Minyard had told her privately that he couldn’t promise anything.

The old lady led the way along the short path and applied a latchkey to the front door. As it opened, Sally caught the delicately played notes of a piano floating softly across the tiny hall.

“He plays for hours and hours and hours,” said the old lady. “Your dear father has just given him a beautiful new piano. He’s been such a friend to Harold. Wonderful the interest he’s taken in him.”

She opened the door of a small sitting room, whence the music came, but the player wholly absorbed did not hear them enter.

“Harold, who do you think has come to see you!”

As the piano stopped and the musician swung round slowly on his stool, Sally shivered at the pallor of the face and the closed eyes. She saw that tears were trickling from them.

“Miss Munt has come to see you.” There was excitement in the voice of the old lady. “You remember Miss Sally of Waterloo Villa. And to think what we’ve been reading about her in the Tribune!”

The musician sprang up with a boy’s impulsiveness. “You don’t say, Mother—you don’t say!” The eager voice had a music of its own. “Where are you, Miss Sally?” He held out his hand. “Put your hand there and then I shall believe it.”

Sally did as she was asked.

“Well, well, it’s really the great and famous you.” He seemed to caress that strong and competent paw with his delicate fingers.

She couldn’t find the courage to say anything.

But he did not allow the silence to become awkward. “Better go and look after your coupons, Mother, while Miss Sally and I talk shop.”

Upon that plain hint the old lady went away, closing the front door after her, and then the blind man helped the visitor to take off her heavy coat and put her into a chair. He found his way back to the music stool without difficulty, but in sitting down he brushed the keys of the piano with his coat sleeve.

“Your dear, good father gave me this. A wonderful improvement on the one we’ve scrapped. Did you hear me murdering Beethoven as you came in? One’s only chance now to score off the poor blighters!” His cheerfulness, his whimsical courage, were amazing to Sally. “Since last we met things have happened, haven’t they? South Kensington Tube Station, December, 1913. Æons ago.” He sighed like a child. “By the way, tell me, did you get a letter I sent to you when you did your ‘go’ of time?”

Sally had received the letter. Soft the admission and also blushing, although he could not see that.

“Wasn’t meant as an impertinence, though perhaps it was one. Always doing the wrong things at that time, wasn’t I? And I’m saying ’em now. Born under bad stars.” He laughed a little and paused. “Jove! what wonderful things you’ve done, though.”

“I’ve had luck.” Her voice was firm at last.

“Not more than you deserve. Hell of a time in Serbia ... must have had. Don’t know how you managed to come through it.”

“Just the stars.” Sally laughed a little now. But never in her life had she felt so little like laughing. She remembered that she used to think him a bounder; she remembered how much his proposal had annoyed her. Yet he was just the same now—the same Harold Nixey—only raised to a higher power. Once she had despised his habit of thinking aloud, yet now it almost enchanted her....

But she was not very forthcoming. He seemed to have to do the talking for both. “Fritz beginning to get cold feet, do you think?”

She didn’t think so.

“What are you doing now?” It was the dry tone of the professional soldier.

“I’m detailed for special duty in France.” The tone of Sally was professional also.

He sighed a gentle, “When?”

“Off to-morrow.”

He sighed again.

“It was not until last evening,”—her voice changed oddly—“that I heard you were at home.”

“Nice of you to come and see me,” he said. “You must excuse the room being in a litter.” There was a table in the center on which was a drawing board, geometrical instruments, many sheets of paper. “I’ve been trying to work. I’m always trying ... but ... you need eyes to be an architect ... you need eyes.”

Sally was suddenly pierced by the thought of his ambition and his passion for work. He was going to do so much, he had begun so well.

“I have an idea for a new cathedral for Louvain. Been studying ecclesiastical architecture for years in my spare time.” As he paused his face looked ghastly. “It’s all in my head ... but....”

“Is it possible”—she could hardly speak—“for any one to help you—in the details, I mean?”

“They would have to get right inside my mind ... some one practical ... yet very sympathetic ... and then the chances are that it wouldn’t work out.”

“It might, though.”

“Somehow, I don’t think so.” He was curiously frank. “I tell myself it might, just to keep going. There’s always the bare chance if I get the right person to help me ... some one with great intelligence, great insight, great sympathy, yet without ideas of their own.”

“You mean they wouldn’t have to know too much?”

“That’s it ... not know too much. They would have to sink their individuality in ... in one who couldn’t.... Your father suggested a partnership. But it wouldn’t be fair, would it? Besides I should be terribly trying to work with ... terribly trying ... perhaps impossible.”

“Do you think you would be?”

“In a partnership, yes. It couldn’t answer. I’m so creative.... I have always to stamp myself on my work ... if you know what I mean. Then ... as I say ... I don’t know yet ... that ... I can pick up all the threads that have been....”

“You need,” said Sally slowly and softly, “some intelligent amateur, capable of drawing a ground plan, who would give himself up to you.”

He threw up his head eagerly. “That’s it ... somebody quite intelligent ... but without ambition ... who would”—the voice began to tail off queerly—“have the courage ... not to mind ... the ferocious egotism ... of the ... baffled.” Suddenly he covered his face with his hands.

“It wouldn’t take me very long to learn the rudiments, I think,” said Sally. “I’m rather quick at picking up the things that interest me. It would be enormously interesting to see what could be done with this—this——”

“But you are off to France to-morrow.”

“The war won’t last forever.”

The tone of her voice startled him. His heart leapt queerly. There was a time, not so long ago, when he would have given his soul to have surprised just that note in it. He began to shake violently.

With all the will his calamity had left him he strove to hold himself in. Her voice was music, her nearness magical; what she offered him now was beyond his wildest hopes. Once he had jumped at her too soon, in a moment of delirium; but he had always known, by force of the strong temperament, that was such a torment to him now, that she was the only woman in the world he would ever really care for.

“I see just the kind of helper you need.” Divinely practical, yet divinely modern! “I could mug up my drawing in a week or two and I should never know enough to want to interfere with anything that mattered.”

He held himself tensely like one who sees a precipice yawning under his feet. “America coming in, do you think?” It was a heroic change of voice. “I wish she would. I’m afraid it may be a draw without her.”

Sally, with all her ribbons and her uniform, could rise to no immediate interest in America.

“Our poor lads have had an awful grueling on the Somme. Seven hundred thousand casualties and nothing to show for it so far.”

“I know.” The sightless eyes were lacerating her. “They ought to help us. It’s their war as much as it’s ours.”

“We can’t blame them for staying out. Can’t blame anybody for staying out. But we’ll never get the right peace unless they help us.”

“Some people think they’d not make much difference.”

“My God!” It was the vehemence she used not to like. “They’d simply tip the scale. Have you ever been there?”

“No.”

“I have. Some country, America. They’ve pinched our best Torrington, curse them ... not that that took me there. One afternoon, though, I happened to be looking for it in a moldy, one-horse museum just off Washington Square—I forget the name of it—when I walked straight into the arms of dear old Jim Stanning who had actually come all the way from Europe on purpose to gaze at it.”

Sally emitted becoming surprise.

“If you read that in a novel you’d say it was the sort of thing that doesn’t happen. But it did happen. Fancy old Jim coming all those miles by flood and field to look at a strip of canvas not as big as that drawing board. ‘The Valley of the Sharrow on an afternoon in July.’ By the way, did you ever happen to meet him?”

Sally had never met Stanning the painter.

“One of the whitest men that ever lived. Lies out there. A great chap, Jim Stanning. Another Torrington almost for a certainty ... although he doubted himself, whether he was big enough to fight his own success. See what he meant?”

It thrilled him a little when he realized that she did.

For an instant the extinguished eyes seemed to well with light. “That picture of his, ‘As the Leaves of the Tree,’ carries technique to a point that makes one dizzy. Some say technique doesn’t matter, but there’s nothing permanent without it.” He sighed heavily. “Of course the undaunted soul of man has to shine through it. And that’s just what Jim Stanning was—an undaunted soul. Dead at thirty-nine. We shan’t realize ... if we ever realize ... however....”

Overcome by his thoughts for a moment, he could not go on. Sally sat breathing hard.

“If I were a rich man, as rich as Ford or Carnegie, I’d buy that picture of old Jim’s and send it to them in Berlin. Some day it might help them to ask themselves just what it was that brought the man who painted it, a man who simply lived for beauty, to die like a dog, half mad, in a poisoned muckyard in Flanders.”

Suddenly he stopped and the light seemed to die in his face. Then he turned round on the piano stool and broke delicately into the opening bars of the haunted, wild and terrible Fifth Symphony. For the moment he had forgotten that Sally was there.

She got up from her chair and came to him as a child to a wounded and suffering animal. Putting an arm round his clean but frayed collar she kissed his forehead.

“I shall come and see you again ... if I may.”

His sightless flesh seemed to contract as he lifted his thin hands from the keyboard. “Don’t!” he gasped. “Better not ... better not ... for both of us.”

She knew he was right and something in her voice told him so. “... If I may,” she repeated weakly.

He didn’t answer. She pressed her lips again upon his forehead, then took up her coat and went hastily from the room.

The old woman was in the act of turning the latchkey in the front door. She had got her coupons and was returning in triumph with a full basket.

“Not going, Miss Sally, are you? I should like you to have seen his decorations—D.S.O. with two Bars and such a wonderful letter from the General.”

“I’m afraid I simply must go, Mrs. Nixey. Off to France to-morrow, and I’ve got to pack.”

“Yes, my dear, I suppose so. Very good of you to come and see him.”

“Don’t say that.”

At the sight of Sally’s eyes the voice of the old woman changed suddenly. “He thinks, my dear, he’ll get better ... he quite thinks he’ll get better ... but ... but, Dr. Minyard....” Again the voice of the old woman changed. “Ah, there he is playing again. How beautifully he does play, doesn’t he? Hours ... and hours ... and hours. So soft and gentle ... the bit he’s playing now reminds him of the wind in Dibley Chase. Yes, and that bit too ... he says it makes him see the sun dancing along the Sharrow on an afternoon in July. Beautiful piano! So kind and thoughtful of your dear father! He quite thinks ... he’ll....”

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