She woke heavy-eyed. After a long wandering in the hot mists of early morning by the reedy shore of the Lake and among the creeks and cliffs and waterfalls, she came clearly to see herself isolated. Since the first morning when she had explored the valley with Ambrose and encountered the swans, she alone (Ambrose not for the moment considered) had made progress in experience. The others, she perceived, had all abandoned the experience which they had begun, content to remain on the fringe, to let it go ungrasped, uncomprehended. They had stopped short on the threshold of the valley, on the threshold of a dream. She had entered the dream. To her life was yielding up secrets. She looked back from the dome of an emerald hill and saw the vermilion roof, with its horns and glittering dragons, of the Yellow Emperor’s Pavilion, in the crescent of the bamboo grove. They were all sleeping there, except Ambrose, the recorder of other people’s experiences, whose white-clad figure she saw in the far distance down by the Lake. They were sleeping, while she woke and strove with what life was offering to the mind. She would keep them there until she had finished, until the valley and its denizens had no more to give, for it is the privilege of those who wrestle with the stuff of experience that they should sacrifice the others. Looking up, she saw that a great mass of clouds in the east was thrusting its arms about the valley. An encircling wall seemed to shut her off from the nearly forgotten world of Europe. It made it easier not to go back. Ambrose pictures her standing on the top of her hill like a fluttering flag. Lonely she must have been. It is lonely, he remarks, to be in the advanced posts in the matter of human experience. 36 In the afternoon, lying idle and alone on the verandah, she reflected that she had not spoken to Terence Fitzgerald for a long time. She could not remember that he had looked at her with hate or resentment. He had been aloof, but that was his habit, and it might be that still he was bound to her in spirit, not resenting her actions. So she went to her bedroom, put on a twelfth-century robe of amber with a design of black and red butterflies, sped across the lawn, and slid through the bamboo-forest, that was heavy and dark with summer, to the tiled watchtower. She climbed the stairs, peering through little windows that she passed, and came to his blue-tiled room. It was littered with painting apparatus. He sat at the window, in his bard-like, painter’s gown, with his hands clasped, looking sadly out over the quivering bamboo grove. When she came in his great eyes filled with fire and his voice rang with joy. “At last the high gods have told you to come?” Then reproach shadowed his face. “But in that alien dress. This is not Lychnis, not my divine inspiration materialized.” “I have abandoned the other dress,” she replied, “for ever.” “For ever!”