.

How would he greet her? Would he be exactly as he was when they stood at
the edge of Tod's orchard, above the dreamy, darkening fields, joining
hands and lips, moved as they had never been moved before?

May blossom was beginning to come out along the hedge of the private
grounds that bordered that bit of Cockney Common, and from it, warmed by
the sun, the scent stole up to her. Familiar, like so many children
of the cultured classes, with the pagan and fairy-tales of nature, she
forgot them all the moment she was really by herself with earth and
sky. In their breadth, their soft and stirring continuity, they rejected
bookish fancy, and woke in her rapture and yearning, a sort of long
delight, a never-appeased hunger. Crouching, hands round knees, she
turned her face to get the warmth of the sun, and see the white clouds
go slowly by, and catch all the songs that the birds sang. And every now
and then she drew a deep breath. It was true what Dad had said: There
was no real heartlessness in nature. It was warm, beating, breathing.
And if things ate each other, what did it matter? They had lived and
died quickly, helping to make others live. The sacred swing and circle
of it went on forever, full and harmonious under the lighted sky, under
the friendly stars. It was wonderful to be alive! And all done by love.
Love! More, more, more love! And then death, if it must come! For, after
all, to Nedda death was so far away, so unimaginably dim and distant,
that it did not really count.

While she sat, letting her fingers, that were growing slowly black,
scrabble the grass and fern, a feeling came on her of a Presence, a
creature with wings above and around, that seemed to have on its face a
long, mysterious smile of which she, Nedda, was herself a tiny twinkle.
She would bring Derek here. They two would sit together and let the
clouds go over them, and she would learn all that he really thought, and
tell him all her longings and fears; they would be silent, too, loving
each other too much to talk. She made elaborate plans of what they were
to do and see, beginning with the East End and the National Gallery,
and ending with sunrise from Parliament Hill; but she somehow knew that
nothing would happen as she had designed. If only the first moment were
not different from what she hoped!

She sat there so long that she rose quite stiff, and so hungry that she
could not help going home and stealing into the kitchen. It was thre