On the day that he and Sheila were to come, feeling she could not trust herself to seem even reasonably calm, she started out, meaning to go to the South Kensington Museum and wander the time away there; but once out-of-doors the sky seemed what she wanted, and, turning down the hill on the north side, she sat down under a gorse bush.  Here tramps, coming in to London, passed the night under the stars; here was a vision, however dim, of nature.  And nature alone could a little soothe her ecstatic nerves.

How would he greet her?  Would he be exactly as he was when they stood at the edge of Tod’s orchard, above the dreamy, darkening fields, joining hands and lips, moved as they had never been moved before?

May blossom was beginning to come out along the hedge of the private grounds that bordered that bit of Cockney Common, and from it, warmed by the sun, the scent stole up to her.  Familiar, like so many children of the cultured classes, with the pagan and fairy-tales of nature, she forgot them all the moment she was really by herself with earth and sky.  In their breadth, their soft and stirring continuity, they rejected bookish fancy, and woke in her rapture and yearning, a sort of long delight, a never-appeased hunger.  Crouching, hands round knees, she turned her face to get the warmth of the sun, and see the white clouds go slowly by, and catch all the songs that the birds sang.  And every now and then she drew a deep breath.  It was true what Dad had said:  There was no real heartlessness in nature.  It was warm, beating, breathing.  And if things ate each other, what did it matter?  They had lived and died quickly, helping to make others live.  The sacred swing and circle of it went on forever, full and harmonious under the lighted sky, under the friendly stars.  It was wonderful to be alive!  And all done by love.  Love!  More, more, more love!  And then death, if it must come!  For, after all, to Nedda death was so far away, so unimaginably dim and distant, that it did not really count.

While she sat, letting her fingers, that were growing slowly black, scrabble the grass and fern, a feeling came on her of a Presence, a creature with wings above and around, that seemed to have on its face a long, mysterious smile of which she, Nedda, was herself a tiny twinkle.  She would bring Derek here.  They two would sit together and let the clouds go over them, and she would learn all that he really thought, and tell him all her longings and fears; they would be silent, too, loving each other too much to talk.  She made elaborate plans of what they were to do and see, beginning with the East End and the National Gallery, and ending with sunrise from Parliament Hill; but she somehow knew that nothing would happen as she had designed.  If only the first moment were not different from what she hoped!