room-tinted faces. She had lain there and thought of Dick.
For these two days she and Dick had hardly spoken to each other. She did not know how he passed the hours; though he went away every morning with his canvases. He had not shown her his work, nor had she asked to see it; for she suspected that Dick's painting was to him what the ruined castle was to her; a place where he could be alone.
But though their days were thus solitary, the nights had brought them near; terribly near, to Jill's apprehension. Their beds stood side by side; by stretching out a hand they could touch each other. And in the middle of the night Dick would speak to her.—'Jill—I'm not sleeping. May I come to you?' A strange voice.
Then, like a little boy, afraid at night, creeping to his mother, he would come beside her and lay his head on her shoulder and she would hold him close. So they would lie, saying nothing, and she knew that she was a refuge to him. But he did not sleep; nor did she; and lying there, her arms around him, she would look over his head at the moonlit square of window and listen to the river roaring outside, and try to remember the days, the years, when they had been happy together. For now they were unhappy.
It was not lack she felt in Dick; it was a terrible, a suffocating sense of overflow rather than lack. He took refuge; and yet the longing in him was to give rather than to receive. He asked nothing of her, ex-