ut turning away
when it came to him that at least he might go in. The key would be under
the stone. He put his hand into the hollow and found it there, and only
when he was setting it in the lock realized that this meant a deeper
loneliness. It would be easier to think she was there, the key turned
against him, but still in his house, than to find the house itself void
of her presence. He shook himself, in anger at the incomprehensible way
the whole thing was moving him. Why should it move him? Then, finding it
cold, the deserted room, he made himself busy and laid the fire and set
the two chairs hospitably by the hearth. He did not light the fire. It
must be ready for her if she came. After it was in order (her house, it
seemed to him now, with a fatalism of belief he accepted and did not
dwell upon) he sat down by the cold hearth and tried to think. But never
of himself. He thought of her: beautiful, lustrous, caged bird with the
door of her prison open, and who yet would not go. His mind went back to
Milly, waiting there at home to apply scientific remedies to his
diseased spirit, and he laughed a little, Milly seemed of such small
consequence. But the thought of the misery of mind that had brought him
here gave him a new sense of the cruelty of the world. For it had been
the sad state of the whole world he had fled away from and here, as if
all misery had converged to a point, he had taken a straight path to the
direst tragedy of all: a mother trying against hope to save her child,
the most beautiful of women pursued by sex cruelty, the gentlest
threatened by brute force. How could he save her? He could not, for she
would not be saved. He sat there until the dark in the corners crept
toward him like fates, their mantles held up in shadowy hands, to
smother him, and then suddenly remembering Nan and hospitable duties
down below, he got up, chilled, went out, and locked the hut behind him.
The house he found was a blaze of windows. Charlotte had lighted lamps
and candles all over it. He was half amused by that, it gave such an air
of fictitious gayety. He did not know Nan had whispered her to make it
bright because he would see it, coming up the road.

The three were in the library by the fire. Amelia had dressed for supper
in chiffon absurdly thin and curtailed, neck and hem, so that Dick had,
without being told, brought her fur coat and put it about her shoulders.
That was just like her, Raven thought, as he went in