rvant without knowing how to speak to him. She ravaged
the newspapers; they never were more bare of reference to consecrated
labours. The nearest approach to one was a paragraph chronicling
a social evening given by the Wesleyans in Sudder Street, with
an exhibition of the cinematograph. In a moment of defiance and
determination she sent a telegram studiously colourless, "Unable find
you wish communicate please inform. A. Cassidy." Arnold had never
ignored the name she was born to, in occasional scrupulous moments he
addressed her by it; he would recognise and understand. There was no
reply.

The enigma pressed upon her days, she lived in the heaviness of it,
waiting. His silence adding itself up, brought her a kind of shame for
the exertions she had made. She turned with obstinacy from the further
schemes her ingenuity presented. Out of the sum of her unsuccessful
efforts grew a reproach of Arnold; every one of them increased it.
His behaviour she could forgive, arbitrarily putting against it twenty
explanations, but not the futility of what she had done. Her resentment
of that undermined all the fairness of her logic and even triumphed over
the sword of her suspense. She never quite gave up the struggle, but
in effect she passed the week that intervened pinioned in her
unreason--bands that vanished as she looked at them, only to tie her
thrice in another place.

Life became a permanent interrogation point. Waiting under it, with a
perpetual upward gaze, perhaps she grew a little dizzy. The sun of March
had been increasing, and the air of one particular Saturday afternoon
had begun to melt and glow and hang in the streets with a kind of
inertia, like a curtain that had to be parted to be penetrated. Hilda
came into the house and faced the stairs with an inclination to leave
her body on the ground-floor and mount in spirit only. When she glanced
in at the drawing-room door and saw Arnold sitting under the blue
umbrellas, a little paler, a thought more serene than usual, she swept
into the room as if a tide carried her, and sank down upon a footstool
close to him, as if it had dropped her there. He had risen at her
appearance, he was all himself but rather more the priest, his face of
greeting had exactly its usual asking intelligence but to her the fact
that he was normal was lost in the fact that he was near. He held out
his hand but she only sought his face, speechless, hugging her knees.

"You are overcome by the