after michael had left, sara went to the window and stood looking out at the trees on the embankment. the heat of the summer had already caused their leaves to turn yellow.
beyond them she could see the river. it always held a note of peace for her. rivers and lakes had the power to speak to her. she loved their calm quietude, though she had seen lakes lashed to fury by the wind. but it was a different kind of anger from the anger of the sea. the cruelty of the sea hurt her—its restlessness, its turmoil, its never-ceasing demand for lives. even when it was quiet it was treacherous. its smiling surface was nothing but a lure, for it held terrible secrets in its heart.
but the quiet of the river always soothed her. she knew it in all its moods—under grey skies, and under blue skies, in the crimson and purple of sunset, in the amber grey and rose of dawn. she knew it at the full flood of its waters, and at ebbing tide. in all its moods she loved it, and she loved her house, yet she felt that she could not stay there much longer.
with the end of october she would go away to italy for the winter. everything here reminded her of paul. she did not want to forget him, yet the sight of the streets in which they had walked together, the hotels at which they had dined, the theatres to which they had been, only served to emphasize her present loneliness.
christopher was the only person who, till to-day, had known of her unhappiness. ever since he first knew her, when she was ten and he was two-and-twenty, she had come to him with her joys and griefs. there was a curious faculty for sympathy in christopher. it made him the popular barrister he was, especially with women. it was easy to tell him things. had he been a priest he would undoubtedly have been much sought in confession. he had heard many stories, both sordid and pitiful. somehow he seemed always able to separate the sin from the sinner. one knew instinctively that he had no scorn for the latter, any more than a doctor scorns a patient who comes to him with a disease to be cured. he had, too, been instrumental in preventing several divorces, and in giving men convicted of theft a second chance without the stigma of prison attaching to them. and curiously enough he had never been disappointed in those for whom he had pleaded for leniency. there was nothing weak about christopher. there had been certain cases he had refused to accept—cases in which he knew the guilt to be a fact, and in which justice could only be avoided by a direct wandering from the truth, even though he knew that by one of his impassioned speeches he could most probably have saved the victim from the law, and have established a great reputation for himself. in spite of his sympathy, he took a strangely impersonal view of things in general, and his sympathy, though very real, was never allowed to bias his judgment.
he agreed fully with paul’s decision that he and sara should not meet, and he offered a silent sympathy which sara found very comforting. after she had once told him about the parting she had not again spoken directly of it. she could not talk of it. she could only try to live her life as best she might in the hope that one day....
but that day seemed very far off and dim.
and in his studio paul was working with a grim, dogged determination. and every week he wrote cheerful letters to his mother, in one of which he had just said that his marriage was postponed for a time; and he never for a moment let her guess the trick fate had played him.
and so september passed, and it drew on towards the middle of october.
