“All that is fearfully true.  But just now—­Adrian, the look in that robin’s eyes—­”

Berridge covered his own eyes, as though to blot out from his mind the memory of that look.  But Jacynth was not silenced.  She felt herself dragged on by her sense of duty to savour, and to make her husband savour, the full bitterness that the situation could yield for them both.  “Adrian,” she said, “a fearful thought came to me.  Suppose—­suppose it had been Amber!”

Even before he shuddered at the thought, he raised his finger to his lips, glancing round at the cage.  It was clear that Amber had not overheard Jacynth’s remark, for he threw back his head and uttered one of his blithest trills.  Adrian, thus relieved, was free to shudder at the thought just suggested.

“Sometimes,” murmured Jacynth, “I wonder if we, holding the views we hold, are justified in keeping Amber.”

“Ah, dear, we took him in our individualistic days.  We cannot repudiate him now.  It wouldn’t be fair.  Besides, you see, he isn’t here on a basis of mere charity.  He’s not a parasite, but an artist.  He gives us of his art.”

“Yes, dear, I know.  But you remember our doubts about the position of artists in the community—­whether the State ought to sanction them at all.”

“True.  But we cannot visit those doubts on our old friend yonder, can we, dear?  At the same time, I admit that when—­when—­Jacynth, if ever anything happens to Amber, we shall perhaps not be justified in keeping another bird.”

“Don’t, please don’t talk of such things.”  She moved to the window.  Snow, a delicate white powder, was falling on the coverlet of snow.

Outside, on the sill, the importunate robin lay supine, his little heart beating no more behind the shabby finery of his breast, but his glazing eyes half-open as though even in death he were still questioning.  Above him and all around him brooded the genius of infinity, dispassionate, inscrutable, grey.

Jacynth turned and mutely beckoned her husband to the window.

They stood there, these two, gazing silently down.

Presently Jacynth said:  “Adrian, are you sure that we, you and I, for all our theories, and all our efforts, aren’t futile?”

“No, dear.  Sometimes I am not sure.  But—­there’s a certain comfort in not being sure.  To die for what one knows to be true, as many saints have done—­that is well.  But to live, as many of us do nowadays, in service of what may, for aught we know, be only a half-truth or not true at all—­this seems to me nobler still.”

“Because it takes more out of us?”

“Because it takes more out of us.”

Standing between the live bird and the dead, they gazed across the river, over the snow-covered wharves, over the dim, slender chimneys from which no smoke came, into the grey-black veil of the distance.  And it seemed to them that the genius of infinity did not know—­perhaps did not even care—­whether they were futile or not, nor how much and to what purpose, if to any purpose, they must go on striving.