It was Vance’s last day but one. He was going back to his family at Euphoria.

He had lingered on at the bungalow to try to sleep off his lethargy before seeing people again, and taking up the daily round. He would have liked to go on living there alone, watching the approach of spring, tramping in the woods, writing, dreaming, trying to adjust himself to life again. The solitude of the place, so dreadful to him during the last days of Laura Lou’s illness, had become soothing now that he was alone. But practical reasons made it impossible to remain; and for the present the simplest thing was to return to his parents.

He was beginning to shake off the state of apathy which had overcome him as soon as the strain was over; but even now he could not have said how the days had passed since Laura Lou’s death. All he was certain of was that, after all, no great inner change had befallen him. He remembered how once before, after he had carried her off to New York, reconquering her from her mother and Bunty Hayes, he had expected that everything in their lives would be new and different and how he had gradually come to see that nothing was changed. And it was the same now: life could not change Laura Lou, and neither had death changed her. At first he had imagined that death, the great renewer, would renew his blurred vision of her, set her before him in a completeness he had somehow always missed. But death did nothing of the kind. It left him only that larval image among the white roses, with which his imagination could do nothing. Behind that uncommunicative mask the face of the real Laura Lou was as he had always known it. How could death give people anything they had not had in life, except the pathos of the thwarted destiny? And that he had always felt in Laura Lou. He had always thought of her as someone thwarted and unfulfilled; had often imagined her life with another man — with Bunty Hayes even — as more likely to have given her the chance to express what was in her. But fate had made her choose him instead; and in spite of the incompleteness of their life together he knew, to the very last, that it was what she wanted. It had not needed death to show him that. It was because he knew that he was her choice, and that she would certainly have chosen rather to be unhappy with him than comfortable and contented with anyone else, that the tie between them was sacred. Death had altered nothing in his vision of her, and added nothing to it. Death had simply closed the book in which he had long ago read the last word . . . .

When these thoughts first came they frightened him. It seemed as though he could never have loved Laura Lou; yet this was not so. And she had never been so dear to him as during their last months together. But since he had honestly tried to give her all that she was capable of receiving from him, how was he to blame if her going had left the live forces in him untouched? It was as if a door had quietly opened and shut in a room in which he was working — and when he looked up from his work he saw no change. Someone had gone out, but the room was not more empty . . . .

He had not seen a human being for the last three or four days. The hired woman, ashamed of her desertion, had offered to come back and help him, but he had refused; the doctor had made him promise to telephone if he needed anything; Hayes had wanted him to come and stay in his flat in town. Vance felt a great kindness toward them all — even toward the frightened hired woman he had no resentment. But what they could not any of them understand was how much he wanted to be alone. . . . He had broken into a laugh when, the day after the funeral, he had surprised Hayes and the doctor furtively hunting for his revolver when they thought he was out of sight . . . .

Now that the time to leave had come, he was sorry he had not decided to go on camping alone in the bungalow. It was a soft day at the end of March; the air was full of the smell of wet earth and new grass; and he sat on the porch and smoked his pipe, and thought of what that swampy wood of his would be in a week or two. He had grown into harmony with his solitary life; the thought of his book was reviving, the characters were emerging again, gathering about him unhindered, like friends banished by some intimate preoccupation and now stealing back to their familiar places . . . .

He was disturbed by the sound of a motor horn, and got to his feet impatiently. Whoever his visitors were, they were unwanted. He turned to slip out at the back of the house, and scramble over a fence into the wood lot. But the sound was not repeated — probably it came from a passing car on the turnpike. He sat down, leaning his head contentedly against the post of the porch, and gazing up at the pools of spring sky between the crooked arms of the apple tree. Lost in those ethereal depths, he was aware of nothing nearer earth till he heard his name; then he started up and saw Halo Tarrant a little way off, under the apple-tree. She looked very pale, but his eyes, full of the sunlit sky, seemed to see her through a mist of gold.

“Vance — I’ve found you!” She came toward him with her quick impetuous step, and as she drew near he saw that the radiance was not caused by the sun dazzle in his eyes but by some inner light in hers. He thought: “It’s funny I was thinking about that wood — I’d like to show it to her . . . .” Then the reality of things rushed back on him, and he stood tongue-tied.

She glanced past him at the dilapidated bungalow. “This is where you’ve been living all these months?”

“All these months — yes.”

Her eyes had travelled on to the background of bare woodland on the ridge. She screwed her lips up in her shortsighted way, and the little lines about her eyes made her seem nearer to him, and more real. “It must be lovely over there,” she said.

“Oh, there’s a wood beyond, with a gold and purple swamp in the middle — I wish I could take you there!”

“Well, why not?” She smiled. “I have so much to say to you. . . . We might go there now, if it’s not too far . . . .”

He said thoughtfully: “It’s too far for this afternoon. We’d have to make a long day of it.”

“Oh, that would be glorious!” She glanced about her again. “But I like it here too . . . .” She looked at him hesitatingly: “Are you living here all alone?”

“Yes.”

She still seemed to hesitate. “May I come in and see what it’s like?”

Vance felt his colour rise. He did not want her to see the shabbiness of the dismantled bungalow, with his few possessions stacked up for departure, and the untidy divan on which he had slept since Laura Lou’s death. “Oh, it’s a poor sort of place. It’s a good deal pleasanter out here in the sun.”

“I daresay. It’s lovely here,” she agreed. “But everything’s lovely to me . . . I’m a little drunk with the spring — and finding you. . . . Shall I sit down here beside you? You mustn’t smuggle away your pipe — please don’t!”

He pulled out his pipe and relit it. “Wait till I get you a cushion or something.” He fetched a blanket off the divan and laid it on the upper step, and they sat down side by side. “It’s good here in the sun,” he said, his voice trembling.

“Yes, it’s good.”

They sat silent for a minute or two, and he could feel that she was penetrated by the deep well-being that steeped his soul.

“You said you had a great deal to tell me,” he began at last, half reluctant to break the silence.

“Yes, a great deal.” She paused again, and met his eyes with another little smile, half shy, half challenging. “But it’s a long story — and perhaps you won’t understand after all.”

He was silent, not knowing what to say, and wondering why they needed to tell each other anything, instead of just basking in the fulness of their mutual intelligence. But he saw that she expected an answer. “What makes you think I won’t understand?”

She laughed nervously. “Because I want you to so much.”

“Well — try.”

She stood up, walked away under the apple trees, and came back and sat down beside him. “Vance — you remember that night when you brought me the first chapters of Loot to read?” He nodded.

“And you remember what you said afterward — and what I said?” He nodded again.

“That night when I saw you go I thought I couldn’t bear it.”

“No — ”

She turned and looked at him. “You too —?&............