in herself and
her prospects, would be Phoebe. Ishmael put the letter in his pocket,
though he guessed she too would have had one, and went over to
Vellan-Clowse, Wanda at his heels.

As he went the realisation of how this would affect him grew upon him;
losing Vassie, his life at Cloom would not only be lonely, but, without
her resolute insistence on the niceties, might all too easily slip into
some such slough of boorishness as had overtaken it in his father's day.
If Blanche had only been different, if she had been the Blanche he once
thought her, how sweetly would the whole problem--of loneliness and a
standard of decency and of this tormenting thing that pricked at
him--have been solved. Even the removal of his mother, though a relief,
added to the sense of total disruption which weighed on him. Cloom, the
old Cloom that had been so jolly in spite of everything, the Cloom of
the first three contested, arduous years, then the delightful Cloom
glorified by that summer of Blanche and Killigrew and Vassie and little
Judith, was dead, and everyone else had flown to other fields while he
alone was left among the ruins. Of all the old atmosphere Phoebe was
the only one remaining--little, soft, admiring Phoebe, whom he had
hardly noticed all this past winter.

Ishmael was one of those to whom the ending even of a not altogether
congenial atmosphere was fraught with sadness; had he been left to
himself he would probably never have moved far out of an accustomed
circle, thus much of the peasant was potent in his blood. Now he felt,
with the finality of youth, that everything had been stripped from
around him, and that no new scheme of life formed itself before his
eyes.

When he came to the top of the cliff above his plateau he turned off
down the narrow goat-track that led to it, and when there flung himself
on his face upon the turf, chin on hands, and brooded. His thoughts took
no definite shape; rather were they the vague unsettled desires for he
knew not what. Just that "something," anything, would happen.

He lay staring at the grass, covered with tiny blossoms of self-heal and
rest-harrow: behind and a hundred feet below him the sea swirled, its
deep peacock hue patterned with milky wreaths of foam; half around him
reared a semi-circle of pale cliff. He stared at the miniature forest of
blade and leaf beneath his eyes, and could hear faint rustlings as tiny
insects thrust their way through it or climbed aimlessly