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‘Not yet,’ said Isabel.

His voice was pleasant and ordinary, but it had a slight suggestion of the stable to her. She wished he would come away. Whilst he was so utterly invisible she was afraid of him.

‘How’s the time?’ he asked.

‘Not yet six,’ she replied. She disliked to answer into the dark. Presently he came very near to her, and she retreated out of doors.

‘The weather blows in here,’ he said, coming steadily forward, feeling for the doors. She shrank away. At last she could dimly see him.

‘Bertie won’t have much of a drive,’ he said, as he closed the doors.

‘He won’t indeed!’ said Isabel calmly, watching the dark shape at the door.

‘Give me your arm, dear,’ she said.

She pressed his arm close to her, as she went. But she longed to see him, to look at him. She was nervous. He walked erect, with face rather lifted, but with a curious tentative movement of his powerful, muscular legs. She could feel the clever, careful, strong contact of his feet with the earth, as she balanced against him. For a moment he was a tower of darkness to her, as if he rose out of the earth.

In the house-passage he wavered, and went cautiously, with a curious look of silence about him as he felt for the bench. Then he sat down heavily. He was a man with rather sloping shoulders, but with heavy limbs, powerful legs that seemed to know the earth. His head was small, usually carried high and light. As he bent down to unfasten his gaiters and boots he did not look blind. His hair was brown and crisp, his hands were large, reddish, intelligent, the veins stood out in the wrists; and his thighs and knees seemed massive. When he stood up his face and neck were surcharged with blood, the veins stood out on his temples. She did not look at his blindness.

Isabel was always glad when they had passed through the dividing door into their own regions of repose and beauty. She was a little afraid of him, out there in the animal grossness of the back. His bearing also changed, as he smelt the familiar, indefinable odour that pervaded his wife’s surroundings, a delicate, refined scent, very faintly spicy. Perhaps it came from the pot-pourri bowls.

He stood at the foot of the stairs, arrested, listening. She watched him, and her heart sickened. He seemed to be listening to fate.

‘He’s not here yet,’ he said. ‘I’ll go up and change.’

‘Maurice,’ she said, ‘you’re not wishing he wouldn’t come, are you?’

‘I couldn’t quite say,’ he answered. ‘I feel myself rather on the qui vive.’

‘I can see you are,’ she answered. And she reached up and kissed his cheek. She saw his mouth relax into a slow smile.

‘What are you laughing at?’ she said roguishly.

‘You consoling me,’ he answered.

‘Nay,’ she answered. ‘Why should I console you? You know we love each other–you know how married we are! What does anything else matter?’

‘Nothing at all, my dear.’

He felt for her face, and touched it, smiling.

‘You’re all right, aren’t you?’ he asked, anxiously.

‘I’m wonderfully all right, love,’ she answered. ‘It’s you I am a little troubled about, at times.’

‘Why me?’ he said, touching her cheeks delicately with the tips of his fingers. The touch had an almost hypnotizing effect on her.

He went away upstairs. She saw him mount into the darkness, unseeing and unchanging. He did not know that the lamps on the upper corridor were unlighted. He went on into the darkness with unchanging step. She heard him in the bathroom.

Pervin moved about almost unconsciously in his familiar surroundings, dark though everything was. He seemed to know the presence of objects before he touched them. It was a pleasure to him to rock thus through a world of things, carried on the flood in a sort of blood-prescience. He did not think much or trouble much. So long as he kept this sheer immediacy of blood-contact with the substantial world he was happy, he wanted no intervention of visual consciousness. In this state there was a certain rich positivity, bordering sometimes on rapture. Life seemed to move in him like a tide lapping, and advancing, enveloping all things darkly. It was a pleasure to stretch forth the hand and meet the unseen object, clasp it, and possess it in pure contact. He did not try to remember, to visualize. He did not want to. The new way of consciousness substituted itself in him.