Perhaps it was as well to make a joke of it like that. June and her father were in some strange and mystic harmony--I had never been so certain of it as then. They laughed and chattered and made witticisms, and all the time Terry was growing younger and happier before their eyes. The Karelsky business didn't really matter; you had only to look at him to see that. "It's what's done in the world that matters, not who does it," was his way of summing it all up. It was a happy ending--for all of us except Helen. She stayed, pale and silent, for a while, and then suddenly whispered something to Severn and went out of the room. He told us afterwards, with perhaps the faintest touch of cynicism, that she had begged to be excused owing to a bad headache. And the conversation went on.... IV June's eyes as she shook hands with me at the gate that evening were shining with delight. "It's marvellous," she whispered softly, for Terry wasn't far away. "It's wonderful to think that he knows everything now, and that we have nothing more to fear...." The night had a glow of moonlight, and in it her eyes were shining--with delight, as I said, but also (I wondered) with something more than delight? I could even see her mother in her then--her mother as she had been years before. Terry and I, having bidden our farewells, walked back down the moonlit lane to the Tube Station. He was staying with me for the night--indeed, for just as long as he wished, though the thought of his unfinished work made him eager to return to Hindhead. He said, amidst the clatter of the Tube train, that Severn, despite the accident, was really just the same, but that Helen seemed to have changed. "I didn't understand her," he confessed. I answered that eight years were bound to have made a difference, and that the last year had made perhaps the biggest difference of all. He nodded then, and was silent for a while. It was obvious that talking about her both attracted him and made him embarrassed. He never mentioned now his old half-crazed idea, that he was personally responsible for all the misfortunes of the Severn family. But the idea was somewhere still in his mind, in essence the same though maybe transmuted into another semblance; and I could sense it easily enough behind the slow, baffled words with which he broke the silence eventually. "I'm more than ever sorry for her now," he told me.