near Miriam's knees and holding her hands out towards the fire. It's all over thought Miriam, she's failed.--I've got ever so many things to tell you. I want to ask your advice--Remember I've never even seen him argued Miriam automatically, figuring the surroundedness, the sudden realization and fear, the recapturing of liberty, the hidden polite determined retreat.--Oh, but you always understand. Wait till we can talk she sighed rising from her knees, and kissing Miriam's forehead. It was all over. Grace was clinging to some "reasonable" explanation of some final thing. She cast about in her mind for something from her own scattered circumstances to feed their talk when it should come. She would have to induce Grace to turn away and go on ... the end of the long history of faithfully remembered details would be a relief ... the delicate depths of their intercourse would come back ... its reach backwards and forwards; and yet without anything in the background ... it seemed as if always something were needed in the background to give the full glow to every day ... she must be made to see the real face of the circumstance and then to know and to feel that she was not forlorn; that the glow was there ... first to brush away the delusion ruthlessly ... and then let the glow come back, begin to come back, from another source. 7 Left alone with silence all along the street, Christine inaudible in the kitchen, dead silence in the house, Miriam gathered up her blouse and ran upstairs. As she passed through the changing lights of the passage, up the little dark staircase past the turn that led to the little lavatory and the little bathroom and was bright in the light of a small uncurtained lattice, on up the four stairs that brought her to the landing where the opposing bedroom doors flooded their light along the strip of green carpet between the polished balustrade and the high polished glass-doored bookcase, scenes from the future, moving in boundless backgrounds came streaming unsummoned into her mind, making her surroundings suddenly unfamiliar ... the past would come again.... Inside her room--tidied until nothing was visible but the permanent shining gleaming furniture and ornaments; only the large box of matches on the corner of the mantlepiece betraying the movement of separate days, telling her of nights of arrival, the lighting of the gas, the sudden light in the frosted globe preluding freedom and rest, bringing the beginning of rest with the gleam of the fresh quiet room--she found the nearer past, her years of London work set in the air, framed and contemplable like the pictures on the wall, and beside them the early golden years in snatches, chosen pictures from here and there, communicated, and stored in the loyal memory of the Brooms. Leaping in among these live days came to-day ... the blouse belonged to the year that was waiting far off, invisible behind the high wall of Christmas.