‘Nothing could be better,’ said Dr Simon; and Lawford, to his
inexpressible relief, heard the fevered throbbing of the doctor’s car
reverse, and turned over and shut his eyes, dulled and exhausted in the
still unfriendliness of the vacant room. His spirits had sunk, he
thought, to their lowest ebb. He scarcely heeded the fragments of
dreams—clear, green landscapes, amazing gleams of peace, the sudden
broken voices, the rustling and calling shadowiness of
subconsciousness—in this quiet sunlight of reality. The clouds had
broken, or had been withdrawn like a veil from the October skies. One
thought alone was his refuge; one face alone haunted him with its
peace; one remembrance soothed him—Alice. Through all his scattered and
purposeless arguments he strove to remember her voice, the
loving-kindness of her eyes, her untroubled confidence. In the afternoon he got up and dressed himself. He could not bring
himself to stand before the glass and deliberately shave. He even
smiled at the thought of playing the barber to that lean chin. He
dressed by the fireplace. ‘I couldn’t rest,’ he told Sheila, when she presently came in on one of
her quiet, cautious, heedful visits; ‘and one tires of reading even
Quain in bed.’

‘Have you found anything?’ she inquired politely. ‘Oh yes,’ said Lawford wearily; ‘I have discovered that infinitely
worse things are infinitely commoner. But that there’s nothing quite so
picturesque.’

‘Tell me,’ said Sheila, with refreshing naivete. ‘How does it feel? does it even in the slightest degree affect your mind?’

He turned his back and looked up at his broad gilt portrait for
inspiration. ‘Practically, not at all,’ he said hollowly. ‘Of course,
one’s nerves—that fellow Danton—when one’s overtired. You have’—his
voice, in spite of every effort, faintly quavered—‘_you_ haven’t
noticed anything? My mind?’

‘Me? Oh dear, no! I never was the least bit observant; you know that,
Arthur. But apart from that, and I hope you will not think me
unsympathetic—but don’t you think we must sooner or later be thinking
of what’s to be done? At present, though I fully agree with Mr Bethany
as to the wisdom of hushing this unhappy business up as long as
possible, at least from the gossiping outside world, still we are only
standing still. And your malady, dear, I suppose, isn’t. You _will_
help me, Arthur? You will try and think? Poor Alice!’

‘What about Alice?’

‘She mopes, dear, rather. She cannot, of course, quite understand why
she must not see her father, and yet his not being, or, for the matter
of that, even if he was, at death’s door.’

‘At death’s door,’ murmured Lawford under his breath; ‘who was it was
saying that? Have you ever, Sheila, in a dream, or just as one’s
thoughts go sometimes, seen that door?...its ruinous stone lintel
carved into lichenous stone heads...stonily silent in the last thin
sunlight, hanging in peace unlatched. Heated, hunted, in agony—in that
cold, green-clad shadowed porch is haven and sanctuary....But beyond—O
God, beyond!’

Sheila stood listening with startled eyes. ‘And was all that in Quain?’
she inquired rather flutteringly. Lawford turned a sidelong head, and looked steadily at his wife. She shook herself, with a slight shiver. ‘Very well, then,’ she said
and paused in the silence. Her husband yawned, and smiled, and almost as if lit with that thin
last sunshine seemed the smile that passed for an instant across the
reverie of his shadowy face. He drew a hand wearily over his eyes. ‘What has he been saying now?’ he inquired like a fretful child. Sheila stood very quiet and still, as if in fear of scaring some rare,
wild, timid creature by the least stir. ‘Who?’ she merely breathed. Lawford paused on the hearth-rug with his comb in his hand. ‘It’s just
the last rags of that beastly influenza,’ he said, and began vigorously
combing his hair. And yet, simple and frank though the action was, it
moved Sheila, perhaps, more than any other of the congested occurrences
of the last few days. Her forehead grew suddenly cold, the palms of her
hands began to ache, she had to hasten out of the room to avoid
revealing the sheer physical repulsion she had experienced. But Lawford, quite unmindful of the shock, continued in a kind of
heedless reverie to watch, as he combed, the still visionary thoughts
that passed in tranced stillness before his eyes. He longed beyond
measure for freedom that until yesterday he had not even dreamed
existed outside the covers of some old impossible romance—the magic of
the darkening sky, the invisible flocking presences of the dead, the
shock of imaginations that had no words, of quixotic emotions which the
stranger had stirred in that low, mocking, furtive talk beside the
broken stones of the Huguenot. Was the ‘change’ quite so monstrous, so
meaningless? How often, indeed, he remembered curiously had he seemed
to be standing outside these fast-shut gates of thought, that now had
been freely opened to him. He drew ajar the door, and leant his ear to listen. From far away came
a rich, long-continued chuckle of laughter, followed by the clatter of
a falling plate, and then, still more uncontrollable laughter. There
was a faint smell of toast on the air. Lawford ventured out on to the
landing and into a little room that had once, in years gone by, been
Alice’s nursery. He stood far back from the strip of open window that
showed beneath the green blind, craning forward to see into the
garden—the trees, their knotted trunks, and then, as he stole nearer, a
flower-bed, late roses, geraniums, calceolarias, the lawn and—yes,
three wicker chairs, a footstool, a work-basket, a little table on the
smooth grass in the honey-coloured sunshine; and Sheila sitting there
in the autumnal sunlight, her hands resting on the arms of her chair,
her head bent, evidently deeply engrossed in her thoughts. He crept an
inch or two forward, and stooped. There was a hat on the grass—Alice’s
big garden hat—and beside it lay Flitters, nose on paws, long ears
sagging. He had forgotten Flitters. Had Flitters forgotten him? Would
he bark at the strange, distasteful scent of a—Dr Ferguson? The coast
was clear, then. He turned even softlier yet, to confront, rapt, still,
and hovering betwixt astonishment and dread, the blue calm eyes of his
daughter, looking in at the door. It seemed to Lawford as if they had
both been suddenly swept by some unseen power into a still, unearthly
silence. ‘We thought,’ he began at last, ‘we thought just to beckon Mrs Lawford
from the window. He—he is asleep.’

Alice nodded. Her whole face was in a moment flooded with red. It ebbed
and left her pale. ‘I will go down and tell mother you want to see her. It was very silly of me. I did not quite recognise at first...I
suppose, thinking of my father—’ The words faltered, and the eyes were
lifted to his face again with a desolate, incredulous appeal. Lawford
turned away heartsick and trembling.