from day to day, and always thinking, trying to lay hold on life, to grasp it in her own understanding. Her active living was suspended, but underneath, in the darkness, something was coming to pass. If only she could break through the last integuments! She seemed to try and put her hands out, like an infant in the womb, and she could not, not yet. Still she had a strange prescience, an intimation of something yet to come.

She laid down her work and looked at her sister. She thought Gudrun so charming, so infinitely charming, in her softness and her fine, exquisite richness of texture and delicacy of line. There was a certain playfulness about her too, such a piquancy or ironic suggestion, such an untouched reserve. Ursula admired her with all her soul.

`Why did you come home, Prune?' she asked.

Gudrun knew she was being admired. She sat back from her drawing and looked at Ursula, from under her finely-curved lashes.

`Why did I come back, Ursula?' she repeated. `I have asked myself a thousand times.'

`And don't you know?'

`Yes, I think I do. I think my coming back home was just reculer pour mieux sauter.'

And she looked with a long, slow look of knowledge at Ursula.

`I know!' cried Ursula, looking slightly dazzled and falsified, and as if she did not know. `But where can one jump to?'

`Oh, it doesn't matter,' said Gudrun, somewhat superbly. `If one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.'

`But isn't it very risky?' asked Ursula.

A slow mocking smile dawned on Gudrun's face.

`Ah!' she said laughing. `What is it all but words!' And so again she closed the conversation. But Ursula was still brooding.

`And how do you find home, now you have come back to it?' she asked.

Gudrun paused for some moments, coldly, before answering. Then, in a cold truthful voice, she said:

`I find myself completely out of it.'

`And father?'

Gudrun looked at Ursula, almost with resentment, as if brought to bay.

`I haven't thought about him: I've refrained,' she said coldly.

`Yes,' wavered Ursula; and the conversation was really at an end. The sisters found themselves confronted by a void, a terrifying chasm, as if they had looked over the edge.

They worked on in silence for some time, Gudrun's cheek was flushed with repressed emotion. She resented its having been called into being.

`Shall we go out and look at that wedding?' she asked at length, in a voice that was too casual.