IV
One close night the following February Valerie rose from the piano a little worn out. But it had relieved her enormously to crash through the Appassionata and the Pathetique and two of Rachmaninof’s Preludes. She had played them in a tense and rageful manner, and the sounds had swelled about the house and echoed about the garden.
She walked out to the verandah expecting to see Dane in the hammock where she had left him earlier in the evening. But he was not there. She glanced into his den, to which all three doors were wide open. He was not there either. She sat down and lit a cigarette waiting for him to appear. But he did not appear. She wondered if he had gone into his back room to write. She got up and stole softly along the path, but there was no glow or sign of light there. Then she began to wonder if he had gone off to Mac’s while she was playing, gone off to escape from the mood that had overwhelmed him all day.
It was a mood that had shaken her and the whole country. The news of the discovery of the death of Captain Scott and his companions on their return from the South Pole had reached New Zealand two days before, and that afternoon Dane had gone into Dargaville for the Auckland papers and the latest telegrams on the subject, and since his return both he and she had been speechless.
Valerie had shut herself in her room with one paper, and when she appeared for dinner her eyes were a little red. Neither she nor Dane were able to more than pick at their food. They did not attempt to talk about the tragedy. It depressed Dane terribly. He had been nervous and irritable for a week, not irritable at Valerie, that he never was. She could have borne it better if he had been, for then she could have snapped back at him. But as there
