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By Root 821 0

of his own thoughts. He attended it almost as a spectator, and remembered with surprise the time when he had thought that one day he would celebrate the Mass himself, and how it had seemed to him that on that day he would die of joy. That day would never come, and those emotions were old and dead. Yet whoever celebrated it, the Mass existed and Michael existed beside it. He made no movement now, reached out no hand. He would have to be found and fetched or else he was beyond help. Perhaps he was beyond help. He thought of those against whom he had offended, and gathered them about him in this perhaps endless and perhaps meaningless attention. And next door, as it were, to total unbelief there recurred to him the egotistical and helpless cry of the Dies Irae.

Quaerens me, sedisti lassus;

Redemisti, Crucem passus;

Tantus labor non sit cassus.

They got out of the taxi. Michael paid the taxi-driver for the double journey and asked him to wait to take Dora back to the Court. They went into the station.

It was yesterday morning that the letter had arrived for which Michael had been waiting. Mrs Mark informed him that Catherine was a great deal better. She seemed, in fact, to be more or less normal, though at this stage one could never say. Of course he must expect to find her much changed. She had not yet asked after her brother; it had been judged wise that Michael should be the one to tell her about Nick's death. His presence was therefore urgently requested in London.

Michael was at once eager to be off. His work was done now at the Court. Nothing detained him. He spent the day packing and making telephone calls and arranged to leave next day on the early train. Dora was to leave by a later train which would take her, with only one change, to Bath. She telephoned Sally to expect her late the following evening.

Dora, who had watched with anxiety the arrival of any letter from Mrs Mark, knew by Michael's excited agitation, even before he told her, that this must be the one. She had waited sadly, but with a sense of the inevitable, for the ending of her time with Michael. She loved him with a quiet undemanding hopelessness. After so much pain and violence his very inaccessibility was consoling. And she could not bring herself to be jealous of a being so rare and so unfortunate as Catherine.

She had not regretted her decision not to return to Paul. With immense relief, and the sense of a load taken off her, she welcomed Michael's support. She wrote long explanatory letters to Paul. Paul replied with angry screeds, telegram ultimatums, and telephone calls which always ended abruptly with one or other of them banging down the receiver. Paul had, for some reason perhaps connected with Michael, spared her his arrival in person. He announced to her, more clearly than ever before, his philosophy. There were no two ways about it. She was the type of woman who was made to vacillate between teasing and submitting. He had had enough of her teasing. It was time for her to submit. This was in fact what she really wanted to do, and she would find that this was where her true happiness lay. Independence was a chimera. All that would happen would be that she would be drawn into a new love affair. And was it right, because she knew that he would wait for her indefinitely, that she should inflict upon him, indeed upon both of them, these continual and pointless sufferings? He was aware that when she had some new fantasy in her head she was cold and ruthless, but he appealed to her common sense and to any remembrance that she still had of how much she had loved him. And by the way, could he now have back those two letters he had given her?

Dora was moved but not profoundly shaken by these communications. She pondered over them and answered them with clumsy attempts at arguments. She also replied at length to a letter from Noel. Noel apologized for having bothered her by appearing at Imber. He realized now that it had been unwise. He was sorry, if she was sorry, that the place had been made to look so ludicrous in the press. But there