Westmacott entered it at the same moment by the swing-gate. His looks were black as he passed me and strode into the house he had not darkened since his marriage. I stood out in the garden alone in the dusk. I looked in through the latticed window of the kitchen, seeing every detail as the detail of a Dutch picture, lit by the fire; the window was very largely blocked by the red geraniums, but I could see the deal table, the swinging lamp, the brass ornaments gleaming by the fireplace, the pictures on the walls, the thin ribbon of steam coming from the spout of the singing kettle; I could even see the brown grain in the wood of which the table-top was made. I saw Ruth standing, and Westmacott looking at her; then he caught sight of me, and with an angry gesture dragged the curtain across the window. I was now shut out from all participation in this act of the drama, but I did not care; I felt that what must be, must be, that the inevitable was right, and, above all, ordained. Come what might, no human agency could interfere. I smiled to myself as I thought of Malory’s triumph could he behold my resignation, and as I smiled I felt Malory’s presence in the garden, waiting like me, and, like me, entirely passive. I saw his face; his iron gray hair where it grew back from his temples; I saw the tiny hairs in his nostrils, and the minute pores of his skin. My head was swimming, and the vividness of my perception stabbed me. Then a little scent floated out to me, and I wondered vaguely what it was, and what were the memories it awakened, and in some dim, extremely complicated way I knew those memories were awakened by a mental rather than a physical process, and that they were, at best, only second-hand. A narrow street, yoked bullocks, and the clamour of a Latin city.... These meaningless and irrelevant words shaped themselves out of the mist of my sensitiveness. I linked them and the picture they created to the violence of feeling within the little room behind the drawn curtain, and as I did so they fell away together from the twilit English garden, the English country; fell away to their own place, as a thing apart; or shall I say, they stood behind the English country as a ghostly stranger behind a familiar form? This was the ghost of which Malory had always been conscious. Then I knew that my troubled perplexity was but the echo of Malory’s first perplexity, and I narrowed it down with an effort of will to the scent of roasting chestnuts. The ancient woman in her bedroom was at her usual occupation.