rate, ungovernable horror.

He lay very still, with closed eyes, afraid lest a movement or a word
should bring back the thing he loathed. Laura sat up and watched him.

Towards morning the wind dropped a little and there was some rain. The
air was warm with the wet south, and the garden sent up a smell, vivid
and sweet, the smell of a young spring day. Once the wind was so quiet
that she heard the clock strike in the hall of the hospital. She counted
seven strokes.

It grew warmer and warmer out there. Owen was very cold.

Laura ran down-stairs to telephone to the Doctor. She was gone about
five minutes.

And Prothero lay in his bed under the window with a pool of blood in the
hollow of the sheet where it had jetted, and the warm wind blowing over
his dead body.

LXVIII

Laura Prothero was sitting with Jane in the garden at Wendover one day
in that spring. It was a day of sudden warmth and stillness that brought
back vividly to both of them the hour of Owen's death.

They were touched by the beauty and the peace of this place where Nicky
lived his perfect little life. They had just agreed that it was Nicky's
life, Nicky's character, that had given to his garden its lucent,
exquisite tranquillity. You associated that quality so indivisibly with
Nicky that it was as if he flowered there, he came up every spring,
flaming purely, in the crocuses on the lawn. Every spring Nicky and a
book of poems appeared with the crocuses; the poems as Nicky made them,
but Nicky heaven-born, in an immortal innocence and charm.

It was incredible, they said, how heaven sheltered and protected Nicky.

He, with his infallible instinct for the perfect thing, had left them
together, alone in the little green chamber on the lawn, shut in by its
walls of yew. He was glad that he had this heavenly peace to give them
for a moment.

He passed before them now and then, pacing the green paths of the lawn
with Nina.

"No, Jinny, I am _not_ going on any more," Laura said, returning to the
subject of that intimate communion to which they had been left. "You
see, it ended as a sort of joke, his and mine--nobody else saw the point
of it. Why should I keep it up?"

"Wouldn't he have liked you to keep it up?"

"He would have liked me to please myself--to be happy. How can I be
happy going on--giving myself to the people who rejected _him_? I'm not
going to keep _that_ up."

"What will you do?"

Laura said that she would have enou