In the middle of the week, waking, very early on the most wonderful of all spring mornings, his inspiration came to him. He got up, and about half-past seven was knocking on Katherine’s door. She spoke to him from within the room. “Katie!” “Yes!” He whispered to her in the half-lit house, across whose floors the light, carrying the scent of the garden-flowers, shook and trembled; he felt a conspirator. “Look here! You’ve got to dress at once and come off with me somewhere.” “Go off!” “Yes, for the day! I’ve thought it all out. We can take the pony-cart and just catch the nine o’clock at Rasselas. That’ll get us to Clinton by ten. We’ll be down in Roche Cove by eleven—spend the day there, catch the eight-thirty back and be in the house again by half-past ten to-night.” There was a pause, filled with the delighted twittering of a company of sparrows beyond the open passage-window. At last her voice: “Yes. I’ll come.” “Good.... Hurry!... I’ll tell them downstairs.” When the family assembled for breakfast and he told them, his eyes challenged Mrs. Trenchard’s. “Now, look here,” his eyes said, “I’m the dreadful young man who is teaching your boy Henry to drink, who’s ruining your domestic peace—surely you’re not, without protest, going to allow me a whole day with Katherine!” And her eyes answered him. “Oh, I’m not afraid.... You’ll come back. You’re a weak young man.” In the train he considered, with a beating heart, his project. The day encouraged adventure, boldness, romance; he was still young enough to believe in the intangible illusion of a Deity Who hangs His signs and colours upon the sky to signify His approval of one bold mortal’s projects, and no ironic sense of contrast attacked, as yet, his belief. If the Trenchards refused to make the incident of Sunday night a crisis, he would, himself, force them to recognise it. He had been passive long enough ... he did not know that, all his life, he had never been anything else. In the train they talked to one another very little. He watched her and was bewildered, as are all lovers, by her proximity and her remoteness. The very love that brought her so close to him made her the more remote because it clothed her in strange mystery. She was further from him than Anna had ever been, because he loved her more deeply ... and at the thought of Anna—so constant now and so sinister—he had a sudden fear of the success of his project....