She was there with him, by his side, under the glowing rowan-tree, gazing down at the little white waterfall dashing so merrily down into the pebbled beck. She was there with him, and his blood sang in his veins and his mind began to work, pounding along as it had not done these many weeks. . . . Weeks? Years—more than a lifetime.
He went back to his picture and thought it very, very bad. Edward and his wife came in and looked at it dubiously.
“Of course,” said Edward, “it is a very jolly picture, but I don’t think you have caught all her charm.”
“But the painting of the hat is wonderful,” said Mary.
“What do I care?” thought Mendel. “It is you—you as you are, smiling, eternally smiling over your little clean, comfortable happiness, three parts of which you have bought, with your servants and your flowers and your bathroom.”
In a day or two he was being whirled back to London, shouting every now and then from sheer exuberance—thirty pounds in his pocket, October to look forward to: October, when London shook off its summer listlessness; October, when She would return; and until October he would run with his eyes on the trail of the burning, creeping passion that bound him to Logan and Oliver.
[II
THE CAMPAIGN OPENS]
HE reached London in the afternoon, and as soon as it was evening went to Camden Town to find Logan. Only Oliver was in. She was sitting in the window smoking. There had been a tea-party, and the floor was littered with cups, plates of bread and butter and cakes, fragments of biscuit, some of which had been trodden on.
Mendel surveyed this litter ruefully, and he said:—