ive. He heard the sound of his own voice and knew that he was
speaking as he wanted to be sure of speaking for these next weeks, with
ease and lightness. He would be able to keep up before Kitty. Until the
very end she should be spared everything; there was joy in the thought,
and no longer any vanity. He would see her, be with her, and she should
not know. He would see her happy for their last month together. He
clasped the thought of her happiness--with her--to his heart.

Like all ecstasies, it faded, this rapture of his return. By the time
the house was reached, the lovely little Jacobean house that they had
found together, the buoyancy was gone and what was left was a sweetness
and a great fatigue. He was to see her; that was well; and here was the
nest; that was well, too. But he wanted to fold his wings and sleep.

Mrs. Holland was not in the house, the butler told him, she and Sir
Walter had gone down to the river together. Holland felt that he would
rather not go after them. He would wait so that he should see Kitty
alone when he first saw her. He liked Sir Walter, their friend and
neighbour; it would not be difficult to act before him, and he knew that
he could begin acting at once; but, for this first meeting of the new,
short epoch, he must see Kitty alone. So he had his tea in the
library--queer to go on having tea, queer to find one still liked
tea--and looked over some papers, and saw, outside, the afternoon grow
stiller and more golden, and knew that all dreads were in abeyance and
that the somnolence, as of a drugged sweetness and fatigue, still kept
him safe.

He was conscious at last of a purely physical chill; the library was
cool and he stepped into the sunlight on the lawn, walking up and down
among the flowers and, presently, across the grassy terraces, to the
lower groups of trees, vaguely directing his steps to the little
summer-house that faced the west and was as full of sunlight at this
hour as a fretted shell of warm, lapping sea-water. They could not see
him, on their way up from the river, nor he them, from here, and after a
half-hour or so of dreamy basking it would be time to dress for dinner,
Sir Walter would have gone and Kitty would be at the house again.

He followed the narrow path, set thickly with young ashes and sycamores,
and saw beyond the trees the roof of the summer-house heaped with
illumined festoons of traveller's-joy, and then, when he was near, he
heard voices within