walls, its painted Venetian chairs and rococo tables, its mirrors,
its modern pictures. There was the library, cool, spacious, and dark,
book-lined from floor to ceiling, rich in portentous folios. There was
the dining-room, solidly, portwinily English, with its great
mahogany table, its eighteenth-century chairs and sideboard, its
eighteenth-century pictures--family portraits, meticulous animal
paintings. What could one reconstruct from such data? There was much of
Henry Wimbush in the long gallery and the library, something of Anne,
perhaps, in the morning-room. That was all. Among the accumulations of
ten generations the living had left but few traces.

Lying on the table in the morning-room he saw his own book of poems.
What tact! He picked it up and opened it. It was what the reviewers call
"a slim volume." He read at hazard:

"...But silence and the topless dark Vault in the lights of Luna Park;
And Blackpool from the nightly gloom Hollows a bright tumultuous tomb."

He put it down again, shook his head, and sighed. "What genius I had
then!" he reflected, echoing the aged Swift. It was nearly six months
since the book had been published; he was glad to think he would never
write anything of the same sort again. Who could have been reading it,
he wondered? Anne, perhaps; he liked to think so. Perhaps, too, she had
at last recognised herself in the Hamadryad of the poplar sapling; the
slim Hamadryad whose movements were like the swaying of a young tree in
the wind. "The Woman who was a Tree" was what he had called the poem. He
had given her the book when it came out, hoping that the poem would tell
her what he hadn't dared to say. She had never referred to it.

He shut his eyes and saw a vision of her in a red velvet cloak, swaying
into the little restaurant where they sometimes dined together in
London--three quarters of an hour late, and he at his table, haggard
with anxiety, irritation, hunger. Oh, she was damnable!

It occurred to him that perhaps his hostess might be in her boudoir. It
was a possibility; he would go and see. Mrs. Wimbush's boudoir was in
the central tower on the garden front. A little staircase cork-screwed
up to it from the hall. Denis mounted, tapped at the door. "Come in."
Ah, she was there; he had rather hoped she wouldn't be. He opened the
door.

Priscilla Wimbush was lying on the sofa. A blotting-pad rested on her
knees and she was thoughtfully sucking the end of a silver pencil.