He was coming downstairs. Her hands went to the pile of letters and busily sorted them. Through the hall. In here. Leisurely. How are you getting on? Half amused. Half solicitous. The first weeks. The first day. She had only just come. Perhaps there would be the hand on the back of the chair again as before he discovered the stiffness like his own stiffness. He was coming right round to the side of the chair into the light, waiting, without having said anything. She seemed to sit through a long space waiting for him to speak, in a radiance that shaped and smoothed her face as she turned slowly and considered the blunted grave features, their curious light, and met the smiling grey eyes. They were not observing the confusion on the table. He had something to say that had nothing to do with the work. She waited startled into an overflowing of the curious radiance, deepening the light in which they were grouped. "Are you busy?" "No," said Miriam in quiet abandonment. "I want your advice on a question of decoration" he pursued smiling down at her with the expression of a truant schoolboy and standing aside as she rose. "My patient's put off" he added confidentially, holding the door wide for her. Miriam trotted incredulously upstairs in front of him and in at the open surgery door and stood contemplating the room from the middle of the great square of soft thick grey green carpet with her back to the great triple window and the littered remains of a long sitting. Perhaps a question of decoration meant altering the positions of some of the pictures. She glanced about at them, enclosed in her daily unchanging unsatisfying impressions--the green landscape plumy with meadow-sweet, but not letting you through to wander in fields, the little soft bright coloury painting of the doorway of St. Mark's--San Marco, painted by an Englishman, with a procession going in at the door and beggars round the doorway, blobby and shapeless like English peasants in Italian clothes ... bad ... and the man had worked and studied and gone to Italy and had a name and still worked and people bought his things ... an engraving very fine and small of a low bridge in a little town, quiet sharp cheering lines; and above it another engraving, a tiresome troubled girl, all a sharp film of fine woven lines and lights and shadows in a rich dark liny filmy interior, neither letting you through nor holding you up, the girl worrying there in the middle of the picture, not moving, an obstruction.... Maris ... the two little water colours of Devonshire, a boat with a brown sail and a small narrow piece of a street zig-zagging sharply up between crooked houses, by a Londoner--just to say how crooked everything was ... that thing in this month's Studio was better than any of these ... her heart throbbed suddenly as she thought of it ... a narrow sandy pathway going off, frilled with sharp greenery, far into a green wood.... Had he seen it?