him; "the business of living takes up too much of my
time."

He leaned over, without replying to me, his hand on the back of Sally's
chair, his eyes on her face.

"It's all right, Sally," he said in a low voice, and when he drew back,
I saw that he had laid a spray of sweet alyssum on the table beside her
plate.

Her eyes shone suddenly as if she were looking at sunlight, and when she
smiled up at him, there was an expression in her face, half gratitude,
half admiration, that made it very beautiful. While I watched her, I
tried to overcome an ugly irrational resentment because George had been
the one to call that tremulous new beauty into existence.

"How like you it was," she returned, almost in a whisper, with the spray
of sweet alyssum held to her lips, "and how can I thank you?"

His slightly wooden features, flushed now with a fine colour, as if he
had been riding in the March wind, softened until I hardly knew them.
Standing there in his immaculate clothes, with his carefully groomed
mustache hiding a trembling mouth, he had become, I realised vaguely, a
George with whom the General and I possessed hardly so much as an
acquaintance. The man before me was a man whom Sally had invoked into
being, and it seemed to me, as I watched them, that she had awakened in
George, who had lost her, some quality--inscrutable and elusive--that
she had never aroused in the man to whom she belonged. What this quality
was, or wherein it lay, I could not then define. Understanding,
sympathy, perception, none of these words covered it, yet it appeared to
contain and possess them all. The mere fact of its existence, and that I
recognised without explaining it, had the effect of a barrier which
separated me for the moment from my wife and the man to whom she was
related by the ties of race and of class. Again I was aware of that
sense of strangeness, of remoteness, which I had felt on the night of
our home-coming when I had stood, spellbound, before Bonny Page's
exquisite grooming and the shining gloss on her hair and boots.
Something--a trifle, perhaps, had passed between Sally and George--and
the reason I did not understand it was because I belonged to another
order and had inherited different perceptions from theirs. The
trifle--whatever it was--appeared visibly, I knew, before us; it was
evident and on the surface, and if I failed to discern it what did that
prove except the shortness of the vision through which I looked? A
ph