Half-way across the _Place_ he caught her up. ‘Where are you going?’ ‘There’s something I must show you. Come with me.’ He followed in silence, into the hotel, upstairs, into the sitting-room. ‘Wait there, then. I’ll come back.’ She saw that she was carrying a purple balloon. She dropped it and watched it go bouncing like a great bubble across the room. In the bedroom she found the letter in the folds of the blotter. ‘_What a silence, Martin! I have been missing you_....’ Aghast, she tore it in shreds. Now to go back to Julian. He was standing in the middle of the room, waiting. ‘Julian, what are Martin’s initials?’ He thought. ‘Something St. V.--G. M. St. V.--George Martin St. Vincent.’ He raised his eyebrows--but grew pale. ‘Ah, yes.’ The paper lay on the window-seat; she went to get it. ‘Take it away and read. There, where I’ve marked it.’ She made a cross with her thumbnail. She went back to the bedroom and locked the door; and, after a few minutes, heard him going downstairs again. Then she flung herself upon the bed, weeping for Martin whom she loved: whom she had left crying for her sake; who should have lived to be loved by his children, and honoured and full of years; Martin who was kind when all else was unkind--Martin who had been dead two days, rolling about in the waves; Martin for whom poor Roddy had searched the sea in vain; Martin who had been comely and now was destroyed utterly and made horrible,--sea-water in his mouth and eyes and hair, sea-water swelling his shapely body to a gross lump. Whom had he thought of while he drowned? Had he fought and cursed? Or had he welcomed death because of somebody’s unkindness and deceit? ‘Martin, I didn’t mean it.’ Martin was almost in the room--quite in the room--standing just behind her, saying: “I’m all right.” He had come to comfort her. Martin had entered into everlasting life. Yes! No. No. No. Dead. Unconscious. Nothing. Beyond sight and touch for ever. PART FIVE 1 It was the end of September. She had come home again, alone. Morning, noon and evening she sat about or wandered by herself, and watched the coloured procession of the days. Chill mornings wrapped in bluish mist broke softly towards mid-day, bloomed into shining pale yellow afternoons, died early, wistfully, in mists again, in grey dews shimmering upon the leaf-strewn lawn and the fallen apples, in motionless massed pomp of foliage burning softly beneath sunsets of muffled crimson, in moonrises strange with a bronze light. The river lay stretched like a silken substance, with an oil-smooth sheen upon its dark olive surface; and all the poplars and willows upon the bank grew both ways--into the air, and down through the water with their long trunks shortened and their brightness tenderly blurred. Next door, the shutters were up, and the copper beech dropped its leaves upon the deserted lawn.