His vision turned outwards. He realized for the first time where he had halted. He was within sight of Richmond Park, outside The Star and Garter Hotel, the old haunt of merry-makers, which had now become a permanent hospital for the mutilated. There were lights to mark the windows of men who suffered. As he watched, some leaped up; others were snapped out. He could hear in memory the starchy rustling of nurses and the creaking of springs as the patients turned. There were men in there without arms and legs and faces; he had shared their danger and he had been spared. Surely the God who had covered him with His mantle, had had some plan—some design of goodness for him!
Far below in a curving streak of blessedness the Thames ran silvered by the moonlight. He could see the clumped shadows of woods and the flicker of ripples striking fire against the banks. More distantly London glowed—a golden flower cupped in the hollowed hand of night. Holding his breath he
listened to the loudness of the quiet. Subtle ecstasies drifted to him, fluttering like moths against the windows of his mind—"lilies like thoughts, roses like words, in the sweet brain of June." There was a design. Maisie had found her kingdom. Was it too much to expect that round some future turning God had another kingdom waiting?
III
He drove back to London by the directest route. He would have to get supper before he made a start. By the time he had done that, packed his bag, and refilled his tank it would be close on midnight. Dawn Castle lay somewhere down in Gloucestershire. He knew the road as far as Oxford; after that his ideas were vague.
He was a little daunted by the thought of Lady Dawn. Everything that he had heard about her, including his first meeting with her, had served to daunt him. He pictured her as a woman with a conscience clear-cut as a cameo—a woman, infallible and unsubdued, impatient of foolishness and gentle in her spirit with the cold tranquillity of a landscape under ice. How would she receive him, coming out of nowhere, unheralded and unexplained? And how could he explain the urgency that had compelled him to come to her? It was a delicate task that he had set himself, this seeking out a woman with whom he was unacquainted, that he might tell her that her husband had not hated her when he died. What concern was it of his, she might well ask. If she chose
to be hostile, there were no arguments by which he could defend his interference. His sole justification was his deep-rooted conviction that he was doing right.
She never cried. How often Maisie had insisted on her sister's abstinence from tears, as though it was something monstrous that summed up all her character! He would have felt far more comfortable in visiting her if he had been assured that she sometimes cried.
As he turned into Brompton Square, he thought he caught the door of his house in the act of closing. He might have been mistaken. It was dark under the shadow of the trees. Quite possibly it had been the door of a neighbor's house. Nevertheless, he hugged the curb as he drove so that he might scan the face of any one on the pavement. Forty yards from his doorstep, at a point where things were darkest, a man passed him. He was a tall man and walked with the erectness of one who had been a soldier. The way in which he carried himself and strode was extraordinarily reminiscent. Tabs slowed down and looked back; the man moved straight ahead, without hesitancy or sign of recognition. It couldn't be Braithwaite; Ann's vicinity was the least likely place in which to find him.
As Tabs let himself into his house, he found Ann in the hall. "Was there some one here to see me?" he asked.