Ishmael followed out all Killigrew’s instructions, but that night he took the letter over to Boase.  It was as though the atmosphere of the old days re-established by its arrival, the habit of the old days, claimed him sub-consciously.  The Parson read it, but did not comment beyond the obvious remark that it would all be very pleasant.  After Ishmael had gone he sat and thought for a long while.  What struck him as noteworthy was that Killigrew should have been satiated with the personal, which he had cultivated so assiduously, at the moment when, or so it seemed to him, Ishmael, after a life spent for so long in the impersonal, might be expected to react in exactly the opposite direction.  Ishmael, as he walked home, was only aware that the letter had stirred him beyond the mere pleasurable expectation of once again seeing his friend.  That one word “ecstasy” had stung him to something that had long been dormant—­the desire to feel life again as something wonderful, that did not only content but could intoxicate as well.  He was unaware of this revulsion, and was only vaguely surprised that a queer discontent should mingle with his pleasure.

CHAPTER VII

PARADISE COTTAGE AGAIN

When the train came slowly into the station and clanked to rest with a long, tired sigh of steam, Ishmael’s first search was for Killigrew’s red beard and pale face.  While his gaze roved up and down the line of carriages a couple of women, one of whom seemed to know him, swam into his range of vision and distracted his attention.

It was nearly ten years since he had seen Judith Parminter, and he stared for a moment in bewilderment.  Fashion had undergone in those years one of its rare basic changes.  Instead of the swelling curves which had been wont to encompass women, so that they seemed to float upon proud waves, skirts had become a species of swaddling clothes caught back below the knees, whence a series of frills clung tightly about the feet.  Rows of flutings, tuckings and what-not, confounded simplicity of line, but all the drapery was pulled in a backwards direction and puffed to a sudden bulkiness behind, so that women looked as though they were walking in the face of a perpetual wind.  On their heads they were wont to perch delicious little hats, poked forward, in contradistinction to the trend of the draperies, slanting nosewards and tilted up in the rear by plaited chignons.

Of the two women advancing towards Ishmael, the tall dark one, by far the elder, wore under a black silk jacket a gown of soft red, the terra-cotta then beginning to be in vogue amidst the artistic elect, but it was smartly cut, whereas the peacock blue garment of her companion showed a depressing sloppiness, which was not helped out by the drooping rows of many-coloured beads which were slung round her throat or the peacock feathers that trailed from her shovel hat of gauged