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he had led her away, and in feeling him thus dependent on her happiness her fears and darknesses seemed to melt away into the encompassing sunlight. ‘Pleased! How should I not be pleased?’ she said. She clasped her hands on his arm and offered him a radiant countenance.

Clive walked beside her, looking down at her, sounding her radiance as it were; and for the first time to-day she was aware of an uncertainty in his. But there had always, since the war, been uncertainty in any radiance of Clive’s and even as she looked at him she saw anew all that Hester had done for him; all the things that a mother could never do. There was still the cold, attentive gravity at the bottom of his gaze, as though he watched for something; but the strain and lassitude were gone. He was deeply rooted in life, in the life that Hester had made for him; and she felt, in seeing it, for all the pain of her own abdication, a pang of deep, impersonal joy. Hester had given him back his manhood.

‘Well, that is what we thought; that is what we wanted;—more than anything;—to please you,’ Clive said. ‘I was never satisfied about your being here, all alone. From the first I hated your going off to live by yourself in the country.’

‘Did you, dearest? I never guessed that.’