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of compassion, as the young mother bending illumined above her baby. He saw her as an old empty-hearted woman, and asked himself how such an unmanageable monster as grief was to fill the room up of her absent son.

What did such people as Julia do with grief, he wondered, how did they make room for it in their lives, get up and lie down every day with its taste on their lips? Its elemental quality, that awful sense it communicated of a whirling earth, a crumbling Time, and all the cold stellar spaces yawning to receive us—these feelings which he was beginning to discern and to come to terms with in his own way (and with the sense that it would have been George's way too), these feelings could never give their stern appeasement to Julia. . . Her religion? Yes, such as it was no doubt it would help; talking with the Rector would help; giving more time to her church-charities, her wounded soldiers, imagining that she was paying some kind of tax on her affliction. But the vacant evenings, at home, face to face with Brant! Campton had long since seen that the one thing which had held the two together was their shared love of George; and if Julia discovered, as she could hardly fail to do, how much more deeply Brant had loved her son than she had, and how much more inconsolably he mourned him, that would only increase her sense of isolation. And so, in sheer self-defence, she would gradually, stealthily, fill up the