He could not bear it.  He went in and kissed the silent, stone-white Marie, looked resentfully at George, answered his mother-in-law at random, and hurried out again.  He was shivering.  He remembered too well now that day which, too easily, he had forgotten.

He neither ate nor drank; he walked the Heath madly.  He told himself that not for hundreds of precious pounds would he wait in that flat, wait for the sounds of anguish which would inevitably rise and echo about those circumscribed walls.  The July sun went down; the moon rose up and found him still walking; still fearing and wondering.

He supposed he was a coward; he could not help it.

It was after twelve o’clock when at last he went home.  He went because he suddenly remembered they had left George in his charge, and while there was little he could do for Marie, he could at least be faithful to that trust.  He came back shivering as he had gone out; and as he fitted his latchkey with cold fingers into the lock he heard the newborn infant’s wail.

The nurse looked out into the corridor at the sound of his entrance; she raised her finger, enjoining silence, and smiled.  She was the same nurse who had helped to usher baby George into the world, and who had been so serenely certain that they would send for her again.

She vanished once more into Marie’s room.

Osborn crept along the corridor and took off his boots; he was tired out, but still he felt no hunger.  Had he been hungry he would have somehow thought it an act of criminal grossness to forage for food.  There was none to attend to him, for Mrs. Amber, having waited to reassure herself of her daughter’s safety, had been obliged to take the last Tube train home since there was not room for her at the flat.  He was about to undress when the nurse came along the corridor and tapped at his door.

He knew what she had come for.  Once again, with that air of lase cheerfulness she summoned him to his wife’s bedside, and once again he stood there looking down upon Marie as she lay there, quiet and worn.  Her quietness was the most striking thing about her.  She looked at him steadily and remotely, as if he were a stranger, but with less interest; there was even a little hostility about her regard.  It seemed a long while ago since he had fallen beside her bed and wept with her over the catastrophic forces of Nature; they were both ages older; as if a fog had drifted between them, their hearts were obscured from each other.  Generations and generations of battle, so old as to be timeless, marked the ground between them.

He spoke hesitatingly, saying: 

“How do you feel, dear?”

“I’m—­glad it’s over.”

“So’m I.”

“You managed to escape?”

He looked at her hastily, a little red creeping over his pallid face.  She spoke almost as to a deserter.  “I couldn’t have done any good,” he said.

She smiled and closed her eyes, as though against him.  It was not a natural smile, it drew her lips tight.