“Yes?” he said presently.

“You are not grieving?”

“What about?”

“This.”

“No!”

“You are not—­you are not even sorry?” she said.

“No—­not even sorry.”

“I can’t understand that.  It’s so much—­”

“I’m glad,” he proclaimed. “Glad."

“But—­the trouble—­the expense—­everything—­and your work?”

“Yes,” he said, “that’s just it.”

She looked at him doubtfully.  He glanced up at her, and she questioned his eyes.  He put his arm about her, and presently and almost absent-mindedly she obeyed his pressure and bent down and kissed him.

“It settles things,” he said, holding her.  “It joins us.  Don’t you see?  Before ...  But now it’s different.  It’s something we have between us.  It’s something that ...  It’s the link we needed.  It will hold us together, cement us together.  It will be our life.  This will be my work now.  The other ...”

He faced a truth.  “It was just ... vanity!”

There was still a shade of doubt in her face, a wistfulness.

Presently she spoke.

“Dear,” she said.

“Yes?”

She knitted her brows.  “No!” she said.  “I can’t say it.”

In the interval she came into a sitting position on his knees.

He kissed her hand, but her face remained grave, and she looked out upon the twilight.  “I know I’m stupid,” she said.  “The things I say ... aren’t the things I feel.”

He waited for her to say more.

“It’s no good,” she said.

He felt the onus of expression lay on him.  He too found it a little difficult to put into words.  “I think I understand,” he said, and wrestled with the impalpable.  The pause seemed long and yet not altogether vacant.  She lapsed abruptly into the prosaic.  She started from him.

“If I don’t go down, Mother will get supper ...”

At the door she stopped and turned a twilight face to him.  For a moment they scrutinised one another.  To her he was no more than a dim outline.  Impulsively he held out his arms....

Then at the sound of a movement downstairs she freed herself and hurried out.  He heard her call “Mother!  You’re not to lay supper.  You’re to rest.”

He listened to her footsteps until the kitchen had swallowed them up.  Then he turned his eyes to the Schema again and for a moment it seemed but a little thing.

He picked it up in both hands and looked at it as if it was the writing of another man, and indeed it was the writing of another man.  “Pamphlets in the Liberal Interest,” he read, and smiled.

Presently a train of thought carried him off.  His attitude relaxed a little, the Schema became for a time a mere symbol, a point of departure, and he stared out of the window at the darkling night.  For a long time he sat pursuing thoughts that were half emotions, emotions that took upon themselves the shape and substance of ideas.  The deepening current stirred at last among the roots of speech.