"We'll go into the breakfast-room. We'll light the fire. I'll stay with you." And by that fire they sat together, cheek against cheek. Day comes early in June, and the birds were singing before Theresa had stiffened in her chair, or their hands had refused to hold each other any more. In the white light one white face gazed into another. "You've only got your nightgown on," he told her; and then, inconsequently, "but I've got you back." "Yes," she said. She had never felt closer to him, and the guilt which she could not forget had become no more than a thin film of smoke. In the afternoon of that day, when she entered her mother's room to put fresh flowers in her hand, she saw her father already filling them, but not with flowers. It was a sheet of paper he fixed between those strangely unresponsive fingers. Across the bed he looked at Theresa, and frowned in his piteous need to speak. "It's all I have to give her," he said, "and she would have liked it. She hadn't seen it because I never showed her anything until it was as good as I could make it, but she must have it now. It's hers." She bent over the paper. She saw the regular lines of verse, and, starting out of them, the words that haunted her. Her mouth fell open, and she looked at him through an immeasurable distance, before she dropped to her knees under the unbearable weight of her abasement. CHAPTER XIV On the last Saturday of that month, the sun, waking Theresa to the great emptiness of the world, robbed Alexander of the sleep which was his by right of holiday and, a moment later, the clamour of an energetic and triumphant hen dispersed his drowsiness. As he lay and looked through the window and felt the wind on his face, he heard a kind of music in the noise, for in its unconscious, harsh insistence, there was a glorifying of life, joy in a creative gift, and praise for the wise use of it. It held, moreover, a call for energy, and Alexander, who had been born loving pre-eminence, could not consent to lie in bed while a hen prated of accomplishment. Murmuring gentle maledictions on the creature, he threw off his coverings and thrust his head and shoulders through the window. It was six o'clock, and the earth seemed to have dipped its face in its own running water, and now, still glistening with drops, it was holding up its head that the wind might dry it. It was a light and frolic wind, taking pleasure in the vast spaces of the world and the youth of morning, whirling about the hill-tops, daring the dark and dripping gullies that rent the cliffs, yet not disdaining the rose-tree on the house wall, nor the points of Alexander's flannel collar and the roughness of his hair. Sharp at his throat it sent its cool, long fingers, and after them came the sunshine with a warm caress.