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coming?”
    Janet’s song stopped. “Oh, Kit! What is the use of telling you anything?”
    “Did you? I’m sorry. Never mind, tell me again.”
    “You know we discussed the whole thing at breakfast only the day before yesterday.”
    Carefully tracking the conversation backwards to its source, Kit remembered. “Oh, yes. Some one for an education conference.”
    “Peggy Leach. And she never said it was education, that’s what you said. You never pay much attention to the things that interest me, do you?”
    Above the spread of the metallic flowers her pale face, sullen in its smooth frame of dark hair, had a strange perverse beauty. It found some flaw in Kit’s practised defences. His mouth hardened.
    “In the course of this morning,” he said, “I’ve seen two people who are going to die, three who depend more or less on me to prevent them from dying, and one who’d be better dead. I’m sorry if I seem vague about the small talk at breakfast last Thursday week.”
    Janet drew in a little quick breath. He tried before she should speak to gather himself together; but she remained silent, while something sharp and unknown flickered into her eyes. It was beyond anger; it seemed to him for a moment to be fear. He saw that her lips were pressed so tightly together that the blood had gone out of them.
    “That was a bit needless,” he said. “I’m sorry—forget it.”
    “Forget it?” She spoke as if she had only just found speech possible. “You’ve never in your life spoken. …” She stopped with a little sound of bewildered anger; she had tilted the shallow bowl towards her, and a stream of water was darkening on her dress.
    “Here,” said Kit, “let me take it.” He lifted the bowl out of her hands, found a place for it on a side table, and began to mop with his handkerchief at the wet stain. The dress, like all her things, was beautifully cut and modelled; he found himself thinking what a perfectly proportioned body she had, with a kind of objective surprise as if it had never had personal significance for him. He felt a sudden sense of relief and freedom, and his anger went, leaving a confused pity for which he dared not seek expression. He occupied himself with the handkerchief and the dress.
    “It doesn’t look as if it would stain,” he said. “You’d better change it though, or you might get a cold.”
    “Yes,” she said expressionlessly. He bent to give the place a final rub. She snatched the handkerchief out of his hand and stood still, pulling it through her fingers.
    “My dear, is it worth it? I’ve said I’m sorry.”
    She looked at him for a moment in silence, then said half under her breath, “You humour me now. Like a bad-tempered child.” Before he could answer she had gone. His handkerchief lay at his feet on the floor.
    He picked it up, damp and tinged very faintly with the correct and delicate perfume that she used. With the potency that scents have to involve all the other senses in memory, it brought back to him the first days of their honeymoon; the sound of deep broken water under the rocks of the Channel Isles, sun and blue air filling the curved spaces of the bays; Janet with her fragile, beautifully tinted hands full of tiny shells that seemed like miniatures of them. He remembered walking with her in the tree-roofed inland rides, where the sunlight dripped through like honey into round pools among the ferns. The churches had been lined with memorial stones to seamen drowned about the coasts; death had seemed to hang near like the other edge of a shining and sword-like life. Her rare concessions had been like the rewards of enchantment; he had not asked, had scarcely known that he desired, generosity of her or that she should attempt to adapt her way of living to his; not questioning what she offered, since she seemed to have given everything in choosing him to receive it. It had been a life lifted out of life. He saw it now, remote and complete as if it had been