, which leaked horribly. Now they had come up
here to get dry.

It was note-worthy how these weeks in Santa Caterina had left their
healing touch upon both. They had been weeks of playing in the warm
sunshine (there is nowhere else such sunshine, so bright and yet so
gentle), of renewals of many friendships, with laughter and embraces, of
rest and healing after strain of mind and body. Recuperation had begun
its slow work. Tommy looked less ill, Betty less nervous and weary;
laughter flickered from eyes sad and pondering, but not now, as a rule,
unhappy.

With broken ways behind them, new roads in front of them as yet untried,
they seemed thus to be waiting a little, putting fragments together,
finding, as it were, their foothold, or perhaps seeking it, as yet
blindly. Prudence Varley's optimism would doubtless have averred that
the finding was only a matter of time. The Crevequers averred nothing;
it was not in them to analyse, as Prudence analysed and thought out. But
deep in their pondering eyes lay unsolved questions--questions they did
not consciously put to themselves; questions as to the happy road they
so blindly sought--whether it ran through new places or through old;
whether, if through new, it could be reached, seeing that temperament,
which had at least as much moulded circumstance as circumstance had
forced temperament, was probably in the end master of all the roads,
insisting that every one remained, as Betty had said, pretty much the
same sort of person as he began.

If one was so to remain, it would perhaps be wiser to seek no more. For
the basis of these new desires was, after all, so irremediably
shattered. What the Crevequers did not know was whether the desires had
any independent standing. For they would never be self-tormentors; they
would seek always, and have a considerable gift for finding, the
happiest way; they understood, as Prudence had said, the art of living
well enough for that. But where that quest would lead them it was not
given to them, not given to anyone, to know.

So, among all the confusion and the chaos of things broken and problems
unsolved, two facts alone stood out, stable and unquestioned, inevitably
sure. One was the complete breakage of the basis of their new
desires--its scattering into fragments, never, whatever else might come
to pass, to be pieced together. That destruction they had accepted; it
was too inevitable for rebellion. They had left that behind them; and