m a greater change
than the languor of low vitality. He had the bright-eyed pallor of the
man knocked down into the abyss and now crawling up a few paces (only a
few, tremulous, hesitating) to get his foothold on the ground again. He
was largely silent, not, it sometimes seemed, from weakness, but the
torpor of a tired mind. He was responsive to their care for him, ready
with the fitting word and look and yet, underneath the good manners of
it all, patently acquiescent.

Then Nan found herself rested, suddenly, in the way of youth. One
morning she got up quite herself again, and wrote her housekeeper to
assemble servants and bring them up, and told Raven he couldn't block
her any longer. She had done it for herself, and she quoted the
over-worked commonplace of the psychological moment. He, also believing
in the moment, refrained from argument and went over to open doors and
windows. He was curiously glad of a word with her house, not so much to
keep up old acquaintance as to ask its unresponsiveness whether it was
going to mean Nan alone for him hence-forth or whether, at a time like
this when he stood interrogating it, Anne Hamilton also stood there, in
her turn interrogating him. Was she there to-day? Everything spoke
mutely of her, the wall-paper she had prized for its ancient quaintness,
the furniture in the lines of grace she loved. At that desk she had sat,
slender figure of the gentlewoman of a time older than her own. Was her
presence so etched in impalpable tracery on the air that he ought to
feel it? Was she aching with defeated hopes because she might almost be
expecting him, not only to remember but even to hear and see? No death
could be more complete than the death of her presence here. He could
not, even by the most remorseful determination, conjure up the living
thought of her. Somehow it had seemed that here at least he might
explain himself to her, feel that he had made himself clear. He did
actually speak to her:

"I can't do it, Anne. Don't you see I can't?"

This was what he had meant when he told Nan he must get hold of her.
What place could be so fortunate as this, full of the broken threads of
her personality? They only needed knitting up by his passionate
challenge, to be Anne. He called upon her, he caught the fluttering
fringes of her presence in his trembling hands. But he could not knit
them up. They broke, they floated away. It seemed, from the dead
unresponsiveness of her house, as if