made love to him to hold him from the whisky, loathing the deliberateness and expediency of a thing which, it seemed to her, ought to be a spontaneous swelling of a wave until it burst overwhelmingly.  She did not realize until long afterwards what good discipline this was, as her brain and spirit refused to follow her body along a meaner path.  Louis never guessed how she thought out calmly whether to be hurt or not by him, and decided that it was better to be a wounded thing hiding her wounds under a coat of mail, rather than a dead thing in mummy-wrappings, in cotton-wool.

But the doctor’s letter generated hope.  She respected the doctor’s opinion.  For him to be enthusiastic about anyone was very wonderful; there was something wistful and very beautiful in this deferring of an old man to one much younger, something very touching in his frank pride in the big man’s friendliness.  Always Kraill had been a hero to her, since the days when his cynical early book of lectures had come like revelation to her, even though she had had to take the help of a dictionary on every line.  That evening Louis went off to the township after three days’ restless nerviness on his part, and three nights’ valiant love-making on hers.  Taking young Andrew she went down by the lake and leaving him to splash joyously in the ripples at the edge, she read the last lectures.

She read for an hour, gorging the book as a child gobbling sweets before his nurse’s return.  She was devouring understanding—­it seemed to her that the lectures were being written expressly for her.  It seemed, with one half of Kraill’s wisdom she could save Louis.  The child got hungry and she fetched milk and biscuit for him.  His crawler was soaked by the water in which he lived half his life.  She changed it in a dream and took him back to the lake again, where the shadows were getting long and cool.  It was possible to think with detachment there, in the serenity of the evening.

She saw, as she usually saw things, very clear and stark, that all through she had been wrong about Louis.  Once only she had come within touching distance of the right, when on the Oriana she had told him that his only hope was to throw up the sponge, as people say—­acknowledge himself beat to the earth as Saul of Tarsus had done on the Damascus Road.  Andrew Lashcairn had done it that night with the little pale cousin; he had made himself “at one with God”:  fighting and struggling had ceased; his life, a battle-ground of warring forces, had become, in a mighty flash of understanding, the chamber of a peace treaty, and God—­a big man—­God outside himself—­had taken hold of him and kept him.  To Louis that could never happen; he was too unloving, too self-centred, too unimaginative ever to see lights from heaven.  Indeed, she thought hopefully, Louis might, in the end, go further than Andrew.  He might stand up in the strength of a man without the propping of a God at all.