The days went on and Judy did not make it.  Only as the lovely spring days, pale with windy sunlight or soft with fuming mists, slipped by, Judith blossomed as the rose.  But it was a fierce blossoming, a fiery happiness, that Georgie could not understand.  It was not thus that the nice jolly Val had made her feel.  She wondered and she felt a little hurt that Judy should not confide in her, but as the days went on her own affairs began to engross her, and she shrugged her sturdy self-reliant shoulders and told herself that Judy must after all manage her own affairs.

It was a wonderful spring, the sweetest time of the year because the period of promise and not of fulfilment.  This spring, in its wine-pale clarity, its swift shadows, its dewy brightness of flame-green leaf, seemed to Ishmael to hold the quality of youth as none had done for years.  He and Nicky and Joe Killigrew and the two girls from Paradise Cottage spent whole days together, for Joe and Judith, though obviously very intimate, never seemed to wish for solitude.  Together they fronted the winds and the quick showers and the bright rays, saw the rainbow lift over the dark sea, watched its passionate colour die and the sunbright foam fade to pearly dimness or break over water turned to vivid blue.  They heard the first bird-notes begin to glorify the evenings and saw each day the hedges grow richer with pink campion, with pale drifts of primroses and the blue clusters of the dog-violets.  The blackthorn began to show a breaking of pale blossom upon its branches and the hawthorn to vie with it.

Once upon the cliff, Ishmael, walking with Georgie, came on a patch of the most exquisite of spring flowers, the vernal squill.  Georgie clapped her hands for joy at sight of the delicate blue blossoms, but Ishmael, lying beside them, buried his face in their rain-washed petals and drew a deep breath of that scent which is like the memory of may-blossom.

As he breathed in the fragrance it seemed to him for one flashing second as though the years fell away, that he was again young in mind as he still felt in body; and for a flash, as on that long-ago evening in Cloom fields when they had cried the Neck and in the parlour that first day at St. Renny, time stood still and everything around the one point where consciousness was poised ceased to be.  Youth, spring, and ecstasy itself were in that breath.  Ecstasy, the unphilosophic stone which alone transmutes to the semblance of gold ... which alone does not ask what will come next, what has led so far, or where lies actual worth; ecstasy which is sufficient in itself....  Even thus had he felt when he had known that Nicky was to come to him, only then the flood-tide of emotion had been set outwards, while this seemed to beat back and intensify the sense of self.