begun in babyhood and continued at the same temperate level to their school days. He had not seen Arthur either since his return. Leigh had been in Europe with his mother and sister. Difficult to bridge a gap of absence with them, Finch feared. He had an inexplicable dread of meeting Leigh, and, more especially, his sister Ada again. Now that he had passed his exams, he would be going to the University in October. Arthur would be there. What would he think of Finch's having all that money left him? Perhaps it would not seem so very much to Arthur, for the Leighs were rich. Their faces rose before him too, Arthur's sensitive, questioning, rather supercilious; Ada's ivory-pale, heavy-lidded, provocative; and Mrs. Leigh like a sister rather than a mother, more golden, less bronze than Ada, her eyes more blue than grey, desiring to please rather than dubiously offering to be pleased. How little he knew of girls! And yet they were often in his mind, when, lying awake, he would make fantastic pictures of the girl who might possibly love him. Sometimes their faces were mocking variations of the face of Ada Leigh, sometimes they were impossible faces with disproportionately large, mournful eyes or wide red mouths like flowers. Sometimes they showed no face at all, only a flat, white disc borne above heavy breasts that pressed against flowing garments.
He reviewed his life in New York as costing clerk. His determined efforts to learn the routine of business, his rides on the Fifth Avenue buses, his visits to Alayne's apartment, the jolly kindness of Rosamond Trent. Looking back at this period, he seemed not to have been himself at all, but a strange translation into a being of another world, already becoming so shadowy that it was hardly to be grasped at.
He went over the happenings of the summer—his practising, his playing in the church at night, the walks home by moonlight, the secret meetings with his grandmother. When his imagination reached the point of her death, her funeral, the reading of the will, and the scene afterward, a protective instinct drew a film, like a fine veil, between
