"Indeed, indeed we will be," said Henry.
"What I want," she said, her upper lip trembling like a child's, "is for every one to know how good he was—how wonderfully good! So few people knew him—they thought him stiff and proud. He was shy and reserved. But his goodness! There never was any one so good—there never will be again. You knew that. You felt it. . . . I don't know . . . I can't believe that we shall never—never again . . . see . . . hear . . ."
She began to cry, hiding her face in her handkerchief, and he suddenly, as though he were many years older than she, put his arm around her. She leant her head against him and he stood there awkwardly, longing to comfort her, not knowing what to say. But that moment between them sealed a friendship.
Nevertheless when he left the house he was in a curious rage with life. On so many occasions he himself had been guilty of spoiling life, and even in his worst moods of arrogance and ill-temper he had recognised that.
But often during the War he had seen cloven hoofs pushing the world, now here, now there, and had heard the laughter of the demons watching from their dusky woods. At such times his imagination had faded as the sunlit glow fades from the sky, leaving steel-grey and cold horizons all sharply defined and of a menacing reality.
In his imagination he had seen Duncombe depart, and the picture had been coloured with soft-tinted promises and gentle prophecies—now in the harsh fact Duncombe was gone just as the letter-box stood in Hill Street and the trees were naked in Berkeley Square. Life had no right to do this, and even, so arrogantly certain are we all of our personalities, he felt that this desire should be important enough to defeat life's purpose.
Christina and her mother, Millie and her lover, Duncombe and his operation, what was life about to permit these things? How strongly he felt in his youth his own certainty of survival, but one cock of life's finger and where was he?
Well, he was in Piccadilly Circus, and once again, as many months before, he stopped on the edge of the pavement looking across at the winged figure, feeling all the eddy of the busy morning life about him, swaying now here, now there, like strands of coloured silk, above which were human faces, but impersonal, abstracted, like fish in a shining sea. The people, the place, then suddenly through his own anger and soreness and sense of loss that moment of expectation again when he rose gigantic above the turmoil, when beautiful music sounded. The movement, suddenly apprehensive, ceased! like God he raised his hand, the fountain swayed, the ground opened and——
Standing almost at his side, unconscious of him, waiting apparently for an omnibus, was Baxter.