He was standing with Tony’s arm around his shoulders, remote, indifferently smiling. He did not like grief, and Tony kept him from her. Her time was far away and long ago. ‘Julian, Daddy’s dead.’ He was bowed over the child; and he raised his head to listen, but made no answer. He had plenty of his own sorrows; and he feared she would wake the child. But Martin might be told, Martin would listen and comfort with large and inarticulate tenderness. He would be standing under the cherry-tree, waiting, just as she had left him. She ran to the window. There was nobody in the garden. A faint light was abroad,--it might be the small rising moon or the dawn--making the cherry-tree pale and clear. It seemed to float towards her, to swell and tower into the sky, a shining vision. Then death, lovely death, lay at the heart of enchantment. It was the core of the mystery and beauty. To-morrow she would not know it, but to-night no knowledge was surer. And he whom they were to mourn was--in one minute she would know where he was,--one minute. She leaned out of the window. Now! Now! But the cherry-tree was nothing but a small flowering cherry-tree. Before her straining eyes it had veiled itself and withheld the sign. PART THREE PART THREE I Judith, looking dazed, shut the door of the mistress’s room behind her, and after a quarter of an hour’s wandering, found her way back to her own room. She sat on a hard chair and said to herself: Independence at last. This is Life. Life at last is beginning; but rather because it seemed so much more like a painful death than because she believed it. She surveyed the four walls in which her independence was to flower. They were papered in sage green with perpendicular garlands of white and yellow rosebuds. There was a desk, a kitchen chair, a cane table, a narrow iron bedstead behind a faded buff curtain; and a distinctive carpet. It was of a greenish-brown shade, striped round the edge with yellow and tomato-colour, and patterned over with black liquorice-like wriggles. ‘But I can’t _live_ in ugliness....’ A clamorous bell roused her from a state of apathetic despair; and she opened her door and crept along in the wake of the click of heels and the laughter of many voices. This was Hall--huge, bare, full of echoes and hard light, whiteness and cold blue curtains ... blue and high like twilight above ice and snow when the full moon is rising. ‘I can always think of that and not mind if nobody talks to me....’