hin sunlight,
hanging in peace unlatched. Heated, hunted, in agony--in that cold,
green-clad shadowed porch is haven and sanctuary....But beyond--O God,
beyond!'

Sheila stood listening with startled eyes. 'And was all that in Quain?'
she inquired rather flutteringly.

Lawford turned a sidelong head, and looked steadily at his wife.

She shook herself, with a slight shiver. 'Very well, then,' she said and
paused in the silence.

Her husband yawned, and smiled, and almost as if lit with that thin last
sunshine seemed the smile that passed for an instant across the reverie
of his shadowy face. He drew a hand wearily over his eyes. 'What has he
been saying now?' he inquired like a fretful child.

Sheila stood very quiet and still, as if in fear of scaring some rare,
wild, timid creature by the least stir. 'Who?' she merely breathed.

Lawford paused on the hearth-rug with his comb in his hand. 'It's just
the last rags of that beastly influenza,' he said, and began vigorously
combing his hair. And yet, simple and frank though the action was, it
moved Sheila, perhaps, more than any other of the congested occurrences
of the last few days. Her forehead grew suddenly cold, the palms of
her hands began to ache, she had to hasten out of the room to avoid
revealing the sheer physical repulsion she had experienced.

But Lawford, quite unmindful of the shock, continued in a kind of
heedless reverie to watch, as he combed, the still visionary thoughts
that passed in tranced stillness before his eyes. He longed beyond
measure for freedom that until yesterday he had not even dreamed existed
outside the covers of some old impossible romance--the magic of the
darkening sky, the invisible flocking presences of the dead, the shock
of imaginations that had no words, of quixotic emotions which the
stranger had stirred in that low, mocking, furtive talk beside the
broken stones of the Huguenot. Was the 'change' quite so monstrous, so
meaningless? How often, indeed, he remembered curiously had he seemed to
be standing outside these fast-shut gates of thought, that now had been
freely opened to him.

He drew ajar the door, and leant his ear to listen. From far away came
a rich, long-continued chuckle of laughter, followed by the clatter of a
falling plate, and then, still more uncontrollable laughter. There was a
faint smell of toast on the air. Lawford ventured out on to the landing
and into a little room that had once, in years gone b