Greta had crept in unobserved; and sat curled in a corner, with Scruff in her arms, rocking slightly to and fro.  When Christian passed, she caught her skirt, and whispered:  “It is your birthday, Chris!”

Mr. Treffry stirred.

“What’s that?  Thunder?—­it’s cooler.  Where am I?  Chris!”

Dawney signed for her to take his place.

“Chris!” Mr. Treffry said.  “It’s near now.”  She bent across him, and her tears fell on his forehead.

“Forgive!” she whispered; “love me!”

He raised his finger, and touched her cheek.

For an hour or more he did not speak, though once or twice he moaned, and faintly tightened his pressure on her fingers.  The storm had died away, but very far off the thunder was still muttering.

His eyes opened once more, rested on her, and passed beyond, into that abyss dividing youth from age, conviction from conviction, life from death.

At the foot of the bed Dawney stood covering his face; behind him Dominique knelt with hands held upwards; the sound of Greta’s breathing, soft in sleep, rose and fell in the stillness.

XXIX

One afternoon in March, more than three years after Mr. Treffry’s death, Christian was sitting at the window of a studio in St. John’s Wood.  The sky was covered with soft, high clouds, through which shone little gleams of blue.  Now and then a bright shower fell, sprinkling the trees, where every twig was curling upwards as if waiting for the gift of its new leaves.  And it seemed to her that the boughs thickened and budded under her very eyes; a great concourse of sparrows had gathered on those boughs, and kept raising a shrill chatter.  Over at the far side of the room Harz was working at a picture.

On Christian’s face was the quiet smile of one who knows that she has only to turn her eyes to see what she wishes to see; of one whose possessions are safe under her hand.  She looked at Harz with that possessive smile.  But as into the brain of one turning in his bed grim fancies will suddenly leap up out of warm nothingness, so there leaped into her mind the memory of that long ago dawn, when he had found her kneeling by Mr. Treffry’s body.  She seemed to see again the dead face, so gravely quiet, and furrowless.  She seemed to see her lover and herself setting forth silently along the river wall where they had first met; sitting down, still silent, beneath the poplar-tree where the little bodies of the chafers had lain strewn in the Spring.  To see the trees changing from black to grey, from grey to green, and in the dark sky long white lines of cloud, lighting to the south like birds; and, very far away, rosy peaks watching the awakening of the earth.  And now once again, after all that time, she felt her spirit shrink away from his; as it had shrunk in that hour, when she had seemed hateful to herself.  She remembered the words she had spoken:  “I have no heart left.  You’ve torn it in two between you.  Love is all self—­I wanted him to die.”  She remembered too the raindrops on the vines like a million tiny lamps, and the throstle that began singing.  Then, as dreams die out into warm nothingness, recollection vanished, and the smile came back to her lips.