it so blithely. But in the very
nature of things there was but one way in which she could help him, and
in that she was powerless. She could not give him what he wanted. But
she longed to be able to.

CHAPTER XI

It was a morning of early March, and Michael, looking out from the
dining-room window at the house in Curzon Street, where he had just
breakfasted alone, was smitten with wonder and a secret ecstasy, for he
suddenly saw and felt that it was winter no longer, but that spring had
come. For the last week the skies had screamed with outrageous winds
and had been populous with flocks of sullen clouds that discharged
themselves in sleet and snowy rain, and half last night, for he had
slept very badly, he had heard the dashing of showers, as of wind-driven
spray, against the window-panes, and had listened to the fierce rattling
of the frames. Towards morning he had slept, and during those hours it
seemed that a new heaven and a new earth had come into being; vitally
and essentially the world was a different affair altogether.

At the back of the house on to which these windows looked was a garden
of some half acre, a square of somewhat sooty grass, bounded by high
walls, with a few trees at the further end. Into it, too, had the
message that thrilled through his bones penetrated, and this little
oasis of doubtful grass and blackened shrubs had a totally different
aspect to-day from that which it had worn all those weeks. The sparrows
that had sat with fluffed-up feathers in corners sheltered from the
gales, were suddenly busy and shrilly vocal, chirruping and dragging
about straws, and flying from limb to limb of the trees with twigs in
their beaks. For the first time he noticed that little verdant cabochons
of folded leaf had globed themselves on the lilac bushes below the
window, crocuses had budded, and in the garden beds had shot up the
pushing spikes of bulbs, while in the sooty grass he could see specks
and patches of vivid green, the first growth of the year.

He opened the window and strolled out. The whole taste and savour of the
air was changed, and borne on the primrose-coloured sunshine came the
smell of damp earth, no longer dead and reeking of the decay of autumn,
but redolent with some new element, something fertile and fecund,
something daintily, indefinably laden with the secret of life and
restoration. The grey, lumpy clouds were gone, and instead chariots of
dazzling white bowled along the