In the writing of his first book--the book which brought him immediate success, _Life Till Twenty-one_--was un-cannily conscious of her presence. He would find himself leaving off in a sentence to sketch her face for one of those quaint little marginal drawings. It was as though she had come into the room; by listening intently, he would be able to hear her breathe. Working late at night, he would glance across his shoulder, half expecting to find her. He told himself that she was always standing behind him; why he never saw her was because she dodged in front when he turned his head. It was the old game that she had played in the farmhouse garden, when she had hidden in the bushes at the sound of his coming. He explained these fancies by telling himself that somewhere, out there in the world, she was remembering, and that her thoughts, flying across the distance, had touched him. BOOK II--THE BOOK OF REVELATION CHAPTER I--THE ISLAND VALLEY It was a golden summer’s evening. In his little temperamental car he was chugging through the Quantock Hills. His car was temperamental chiefly because he had picked it up as a bargain second hand. In his wanderings of the last month he had established a friendship with it which was almost human, as a man does with a piece of machinery when he is lonely. When the tour had first been planned it had included Ruddy; but at the last moment Ruddy had joined a pierrot-troupe, leaving Teddy to set off by himself. That vacant place at his side reproached him; a two-seater is so obviously meant for two persons. He had told himself faery-tales about how he might fill it. Sometimes he had invented a companion for himself--a girl with gray eyes and bronze-black hair. She seemed especially real to him when night had fallen and the timid shadows of lovers pressed back into the hedges as his lamps discovered them on the road ahead. For the past month his mind had been ablaze with an uplifted sense of beauty. He had come down from London by lazy stages, halting here a day and there a day to sketch. Every mile of the way the air had been summer-freighted; the freedom of it had got into his blood. Everywhere that he had gone he had encountered new surprises--gray cathedral cities, sleepy villages, the blue sea of Devon; places and things of which he had only heard, and others which he hadn’t known existed. Dreams were materializing and stepping out to meet him. Eden Row, with its recluse atmosphere, was ceasing to be all his world. His emotions gathered themselves up into an urgent longing--to be young, to live intensely, to miss nothing.