Susan Brundon, Susan ... the right woman.  He marvelled again at the brightness of spirit that shone in her—­like a flame through a fine paper lantern.  Susan, at Myrtle Forge.  His thought became concrete; he knew now, definitely, that he had determined to marry her.  His peace of mind increased.  There was no need for hurry, the mere idea was irradiating; yet there must be no unnecessary delay.  Incontrovertibly he had passed forty.  The best period in a man’s life.  They would go to the West Indies, he decided.  A ring with a square emerald, and roses of pearls.  It was, almost immediately, time to retire.  His room, narrow with a sloping wall, had a small window giving on a flawless rectangle of snow like the purity of Susan Brundon.

As he lay in bed, staring wakefully against the dark, another memory crept into his thoughts—­the echo of a small, querulous voice, “yellow rock candy and syllabubs.”  Eunice!  A sudden consternation seized him as he realized the necessity of telling Susan fully about his daughter.  No escape, evasion, was possible.  If she discovered the existence, the history, of the child afterward—­he lingered over the happiness that term implied—­it would destroy her.  This, he told himself, was not merely melodrama; he was thinking of her delicate spirituality, so completely shielded from the bald fatality of facts.  An increasing dread seized him at the thought of the hurt his revelation would inflict on her.  The interweaving of life in life, consequence on consequence, the unbroken intricacy of the whole fabric of existence, realized anew, filled him with bitter rebellion.  The blind commitment of a vanished youth, potent after years, still hung in a dark cloud over Susan Brundon.  He was conscious of the past like an insuperable lead weight dragging at his attempted progress.  The secret errors of all the pasts that had made him rose in a haggard, shadowy troop about his bed, perpetuated, multiplied, against his aspirations of tranquil release.

Yet, he told himself, dressing in the bright flood of morning, if nothing perished but the mere, shredding flesh, one quality persisted equally with the other—­the symbol of Essie Scofield was no more actual than Susan.  He had breakfast early, with Graham Jannan; and, in a reviving optimism, arranged for the Jannans to bring Miss Brundon to Myrtle Forge for a night before her departure.  He whirled away, in a sparkling veil of flung snow crystals, before the women appeared.

Susan Brundon would, naturally, shrink from what he must tell her; but he was suddenly confident of his ability to convince her of the superior importance of the actuality of what they together might make of the future.  He was accustomed to the bending of circumstance to his will; in the end he would prove stronger than any hesitancy she might, perhaps, reveal.  His desire to have her had grown to such proportions that he could not, for an instant, think of existence without her as an intimate part.  He even mentally determined when he should go to the city, the jeweller’s, for the square emerald and flowered pearls.  He would do over the rooms where he had lived in the thin formality of his marriage with Phebe, settle an amount on Essie ... shredding flesh.  It would do the living woman no more injury than the dead.  Oranges and brandy, satin and gold and ease.