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remote segment of his consciousness that he became aware of the fine, full flood of sunshine which poured in from the southern-opening window and lay, mellow and warm, upon his littered books and travel-stained trunk.
    Casual and preoccupied were the glances he cast, each time his mechanical perambulation brought him to that pleasant window, at the sun-bathed traffic and the hurrying crowd. London Bridge Road melted into his thought; or rather his thought took possession of London Bridge Road and reduced it to a mere sounding -board for the emotion that obsessed him.
    That emotion—and Nance got exquisite pleasure from hearing him say the words, though she turned her face away from him as he said them—took, as he paced his room, passionate and ardent shape. He didnot re-vivify the whole of her,—of the fair young being whose sweetness had got into his blood. He confined himself to thinking of the delicate tilt of her head and of the spaciousness between her breasts, spaciousness that somehow reminded him of Pheidian sculpture.
    He hadn’t anticipated this particular kind of escape—though it was certainly the escape he had been seeking —amid the roar of London’s streets; but after all, if it did give him his cup of nepenthe, his desired anodyne , how much the more did he gain when it gave him so thrilling an experience in addition? Why, indeed, should he not dream that the gods were for once helping him out and that the generous grace of his girl’s form was symbolic of the restorative virtue of the great Mother herself?
    Restoration was undoubtedly the thing he wanted—and in recalling his thoughts of that earlier hour, to her now walking with him, he found himself enlarging upon it all quite unscrupulously in terms of what he now felt—restoration on any terms, at any cost, to the kindly normal paths out of which he had been so roughly thrown. He thrust indignantly back, he told her, that eventful morning the intrusive thought that it was only the Spring that worked so prosperously upon him. He did not want it to be the Spring; he wanted it to be the girl. The Spring would pass; the girl, if his feeling for her—and he glanced at the broad-rimmed hat and shadowy profile at his side—were not altogether illusive, would remain. And it was the faculty for remaining that he especially required in his raft of refuge.
    Up and down his room, at any rate, he walked that day with a heightened consciousness such as he hadnot known for many clouded months. “The Spring”—and in his imaginative reaction to his own memories he grew, so Nance felt with what was perhaps her first serious pang, almost feverishly eloquent—“the Spring, whether I cared to recognise it or not, waved thrilling arms towards me. I felt it”—and he raised his voice so loud that the girl looked uneasily round them—“in the warmth of the sun, in the faces of the wistful shop girls, in the leaves budding against the smoke of the Borough. It had come to me again, and you—you had brought it! It had come to me again, the Eternal Return, the antiphonal world-deep Renewal. It had come, Nance, and all the slums of Rotherhithe and Wapping, and all the chimneys, workshops, wharves and tenements of the banks of this river of yours could not stop the rising of the sap. The air came to me that morning, my girl!”—and he unconsciously quickened his steps as he spoke till, for all her long youthful limbs she could hardly keep pace with him—“as if it had passed over leagues of green meadows. And it had! It had, Nance! And it throbbed for me, child, with the sweetness of your very soul.” He paused for a moment and, as they debouched more directly eastward through a poor and badly lit street, she caught him muttering to himself what she knew was Latin.
    He answered her quick look—her look that had a dim uneasiness in it—with a slow repetition of the famous line, and Nance was still quite enough of a young girl to feel a thrill of pride that