That night about seven Ethel came into their room with a waste-paper basket she had bought for him, and found him sitting at the little toilet table at which he was to "write." The outlook was, for a London outlook, spacious, down a long slope of roofs towards the Junction, a huge sky of blue passing upward to the darkling zenith and downward into a hazy bristling mystery of roofs and chimneys, from which emerged signal lights and steam puffs, gliding chains of lit window carriages and the vague vistas of streets. She showed him the basket and put it beside him, and then her eye caught the yellow document in his hand. "What is that you have there?"
He held it out to her. "I found it--lining my yellow box. I had it at Whortley."
She took it and perceived a chronological scheme. It was headed "SCHEMA," there were memoranda in the margin, and all the dates had been altered by a hasty hand.
"Hasn't it got yellow?" she said.
That seemed to him the wrong thing for her to say. He stared at the document with a sudden accession of sympathy. There was an interval. He became aware of her hand upon his shoulder, that she was bending over him. "Dear," she whispered, with a strange change in the quality of her voice. He knew she was seeking to say something that was difficult to say.
"Yes?" he said presently.
"You are not grieving?"
"What about?"
"_This_."
"No!"
"You are not--you are not even sorry?" she said.
"No--not even sorry."
"I can't understand that. It's so much--"
"I'm glad," he proclaimed. "_Glad."_
"But--the trouble--the expense--everything--and your work?"
"Yes," he said, "that's just it."
She looked at him doubtfully. He glanced up at her, and she questioned his eyes. He put his arm about her, and presently and almost absent-mindedly she obeyed his pressure and bent down and kissed him.
"It settles things," he said, holding her. "It joins us. Don't you see? Before ... But now it's different. It's something we have between us. It's something that ... It's the link we needed. It will hold us together, cement us together. It will be our life. This will be my work now. The other ..."
He faced a truth. "It was just ... vanity!"
There was still a shade of doubt in her face, a wistfulness.
Presently she spoke.
"Dear," she said.
"Yes?"
She knitted her brows. "No!" she said. "I can't say it."
In the interval she came into a sitting position on his knees.
He kissed her hand, but her face remained grave, and she looked out upon the twilight. "I know I'm stupid," she said. "The things I say ... aren't the things I feel."
He waited for her to say more.
"It's no good," she said.
He felt the onus of expression lay on him. He too found it a little difficult to put into words. "I think I understand," he said, and wrestled with the impalpable. The pause seemed long and yet not altogether vacant. She lapsed abruptly into the prosaic. She started from him.
"If I don't go down, Mother will get supper ..."
At the door she stopped and turned a twilight face to him. For a moment they scrutinised one another. To her he was no more than a dim outline. Impulsively he held out his arms....
