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to him. They made unharassed work possible, relieved anxieties he could barely control and tears he refused to acknowledge openly, but from which, on that account, he suffered all the more.
    Margaret’s small guilt derived from her knowledge that she was so much better off than her friends and that this happy state was none of her own doing, but solely Colin’s. She had always understood her very real debt to him. It did not improve their relationship, rather the reverse. The more he loved her, the more he gave her, the more she resented her failure to equal his gifts, even to admire the giver. Not only in his attitude to herself but in his whole life and attainments. It was some quality in herself that stopped her, that drove her to criticize even his friends for praising his brains, his hard work, his loyalty. When her own friends, envying her new freedom from housework and cooking said, “Colin again! My dear, you’re the luckiest woman I know,’’ she felt like slapping their faces. And then the guilt returned. For it wasn’t only the Ogdens she must thank Colin for. It was Boris. The small uncomfortable guilt of March had grown into the delicious guilt of June.
    One day in the middle of the month Margaret took the newspaper and a book to the end of the garden where she arranged herself on a brightly-coloured canvas and chrome metal day-bed, piled with cushions, to wait for Boris. He had telephoned that morning to say he would come between two and four. All very proper and above-board. The Ogdens were devoted to Mr. Sudenic. They had not forgotten his arrival in the snow. Louise, who attended English language classes at the Institute, would be out.
    Arranging the day-bed in the shade of their two trees, Margaret looked about her. The gardens of these houses were small, long in proportion to their width. They gave very little privacy, since the back windows of their neighbours, as well as their own, gave a good view of the whole of at least three gardens, together with a partial view of the mews beyond, where the Brentwoods garaged their car. A door in the high wall at the end of the garden gave easy access to the mews. To secure a small part of the garden from prying eyes Colin had put up a short length of wattle fence not far from the two trees. On the side of this facing the house he had grown climbing roses, which were now all in bloom.
    Margaret pulled the day-bed close to this screen where part of it afforded a deep shadow for her head while on the rest of its length the sun filtered through leaves in a pattern she found entrancing. Even in London, she thought, the garden is beautiful, almost as beautiful as it was at home the year before the war. She laughed at herself for the comparison, recklessly happy, reaching back, as usual now, to her young pleasures and fulfilments, her easy existence, her natural assumption of prosperity and safe living.
    Before stretching out on the cushions she looked up sharply at the windows along the row. All empty except one, the inevitable exception, Flora, Lady Cotville. The old woman lived at her window. There was never a day when she was not there with her high-brushed mass of white hair, yellow in the front where it was stained by tobacco smoke from her eternal cigarette, her high-necked, lace-fronted blouse, her gold watch pinned to the lace, her rings, her sad ivory face. Does she count his visits, Margaret wondered. She can’t possibly see me when I lie down, but is that a good thing or not? Is she a menace or just the pathetic old bore she seems to be when I visit her? Perhaps I’d better take her in some roses. She likes that. “I’ve admired them so much from afar, my dear. It’ll be heaven to smell them as well.’’ Keeping up with what she thought was the fashionable idiom, poor old thing.
    Folding back the newspaper Margaret felt goodwill to all pour through her in a generous flood. Colin included. It was a day when