Day comes early in June, and the birds were singing before Theresa had stiffened in her chair, or their hands had refused to hold each other any more. In the white light one white face gazed into another.
"You've only got your nightgown on," he told her; and then, inconsequently, "but I've got you back."
"Yes," she said. She had never felt closer to him, and the guilt which she could not forget had become no more than a thin film of smoke.
In the afternoon of that day, when she entered her mother's room to put fresh flowers in her hand, she saw her father already filling them, but not with flowers. It was a sheet of paper he fixed between those strangely unresponsive fingers.
Across the bed he looked at Theresa, and frowned in his piteous need to speak.
"It's all I have to give her," he said, "and she would have liked it. She hadn't seen it because I never showed her anything until it was as good as I could make it, but she must have it now. It's hers."
She bent over the paper. She saw the regular lines of verse, and, starting out of them, the words that haunted her. Her mouth fell open, and she looked at him through an immeasurable distance, before she dropped to her knees under the unbearable weight of her abasement.
[CHAPTER XIV]
On the last Saturday of that month, the sun, waking Theresa to the great emptiness of the world, robbed Alexander of the sleep which was his by right of holiday and, a moment later, the clamour of an energetic and triumphant hen dispersed his drowsiness.