r Peter to find himself resisting the
implication of his appearance in favour of what was coming to him out of
the retouched, sensitive surfaces of his past.

He knew so well as he looked at the girl, what had produced her. She was
leaning a little from the window in a way that brought more of her face
into view, and though from where he sat Peter could have very little
notion of the points of the nearing landscape, he knew by what he saw of
her, that somewhere across the low runnels in the windy reeds she had
caught sight of the "sea birds' nest."

He did not on that account change his position so that he might have a
glimpse of the dark hills of Arqua or the towers of Venice repeating
themselves in the lustrous, spacious sea. Sitting opposite the girl, he
saw in her following eyes the silver trails of water and the dim
procession down them of old loves, old wars, old splendours, much better
than the thin line of the landscape presented them to his weary sense.
He leaned back as far as the stiff seat allowed, watching the Old World
shine on her face, where the low light, striking obliquely on the water,
turned it white above black shoals of weed. For the first time since his
illness his mind slipped the leash of maimed desire, and as if it parted
for him there beyond the window of the railway carriage, struck into the
trail to the House. The walls of it rose up straight and shining, gilded
purely; the windows arching to summer blueness, let in with them the
smell of the wilding rose at the turn of the road and the evening
clamour of the birds in Bloombury wood.

All this time Peter had been sitting in an Italian railway carriage,
knee to knee with a pirate bearded Austrian Jew who gave him the
greatest possible occasion for wishing the window opened, and when the
jar of the checked train drew him into consciousness again, he was at a
loss to know what had set him off so far until he caught sight of the
girl. She was buttoning on her jacket with fingers that trembled with
excitement as she constrained herself to the recapitulation of the two
suitcases, the hat box and three parcels which her companion in order to
have well in hand, had been alternately picking up and dropping ever
since they sighted the tower of San Georgio dark against the sea
streaked west.

"Two and one is three and three is six and the _'Baedeker'_ and the
umbrellas," said the girl. "No, I don't have to look in the address
book. I have it by hea