g wisdom. But now, what would his life be without that light
that had always shone on his path? He did not, he could not, begin to
think about the future. He knew only that the present had crumbled into
ruins around him. That, he realised the next morning when, after some
snatches of uneasy sleep, he suddenly wakened with a sense of absolute
horror upon him, before he remembered shuddering what that horror was.
He had wanted to tell her about yesterday, about the "Equator," he said
to himself with a dull aching pain almost like resentment--he wanted to
have her approval, to have the sense that for her what he did was right,
was wise. But he knew now in his heart, as he really had known all the
time, that it was she who had been the wise one. And part of the horror,
as the time went on, would be to realise that when she had gone out of
the world something had gone out of himself too, which she had told him
was there. And he had dreamt that it was true. But that would come when
the details of misery were realised by him one by one, as after some
hideous explosion it is not possible to see at once in the wreck made by
the catastrophe all the ghastly confirmations of disaster that come to
light with the days. The first days were not the worst, either for him
or for Rachel, as each one of them afterwards secretly found. For though
life had come to a standstill, had stopped dead, with a sudden shock
that had thrown everything in it out of gear, there were at first new
and strange duties to be accomplished that filled up the hours and kept
the standards of ordinary existence at bay. There were letters of
condolence to be answered, tributes of flowers to be acknowledged, sent
by well-meaning friends moved by some impotent impulse of consolation,
until the air became heavy with the scent of camellias and lilies.
Rachel moved about in the darkened rooms, feeling as if the faint,
sweet, overpowering perfume were a kind of anodyne, that was mercifully,
during those early days, lulling her senses into lethargy. To the end of
her days the scent of the white lily would bring back to her the feeling
of actually living again through that first time of numbing grief. How
many hours, how many days and nights she and her father had lived within
that quiet sanctuary they could not have told--lived in the dark
stillness, with one room, the stillest of all, containing the beloved
something strangely aloof all that was left of the thing that had