"Hullo," grinned Finch, "we thought you had got stage fright."
Eden stood at the end of the bridge, his eyes on Leigh. Leigh thought: "He's smiling at me, looking at me, and yet he doesn't really seem to see me. I don't think I like him."
Finch said: "This is Arthur Leigh, Eden. . . . He has been wondering if it's too damp for you here."
"I'm as seasoned to damp as an oyster," answered Eden, shaking hands with Leigh so warmly that he obliterated the first impression of inviolable detachment.
Leigh said: "I hope you are not going to be as reticent as one. I'm very keen to hear some of your poems, if I may. Did Finch tell you?"
"Yes." The eyes of the brothers met. Understanding flashed between them. Finch thought: "I've made him happy. It's glorious, this doing things for others. I can't imagine why other rich people don't try it!"
Eden talked freely to Leigh of his coming trip to France, unconscious that Leigh knew Finch's motive for borrowing the money. Leigh thought: "Doesn't he think me capable of putting two and two together? Perhaps he doesn't care. He knows he can make three or five of them whenever he wants."
The sun rose high, pouring warmth into the ravine, which appeared to stretch itself, languorous and supine, under that delayed caress.
They sat down on the bridge, which was now dry, while Eden, in his deep mellow voice, read poem after poem. Some had been read before, to Alayne, but not all. They were the essence he had drawn from the past summer, what he had formed into strength and brightness from those shadowed months. As he listened to his own words, and saw the rapt faces of the two boys, he wondered whether the solution of his life might not lie in such moments. Might not the suffering he knew he had caused in the lives nearest him be justified, even be necessary to the creation of his poetry? The evil in him was inseparable from the good, like the gods, whose energies were directed first into one channel, then another. So he
