AFTER Michael had left, Sara went to the window and stood looking out at the trees on the Embankment. The heat of the summer had already caused their leaves to turn yellow.  
Beyond them she could see the river. It always held a note of peace for her. Rivers and lakes had the power to speak to her. She loved their calm quietude, though she had seen lakes lashed to fury by the wind. But it was a different kind of anger from the anger of the sea. The cruelty of the sea hurt her—its restlessness, its turmoil, its never-ceasing demand for lives. Even when it was quiet it was treacherous. Its smiling surface was nothing but a lure, for it held terrible secrets in its heart.
 
But the quiet of the river always soothed her. She knew it in all its moods—under grey skies, and under blue skies, in the crimson and purple of sunset, in the amber grey and rose of dawn. She knew it at the full flood of its waters, and at ebbing tide. In all its moods she loved it, and she loved her house, yet she felt that she could not stay there much longer.
 
 
With the end of October she would go away to Italy for the winter. Everything here reminded her of Paul. She did not want to forget him, yet the sight of the streets in which they had walked together, the hotels at which they had dined, the theatres to which they had been, only served to emphasize her present loneliness.
 
Christopher was the only person who, till to-day, had known of her unhappiness. Ever since he first knew her, when she was ten and he was two-and-twenty, she had come to him with her joys and griefs. There was a curious faculty for sympathy in Christopher. It made him the popular barrister he was, especially with women. It was easy to tell him things. Had he been a priest he would undoubtedly have been much sought in confession. He had heard many stori............