He had settled down to work before he missed his pipe or remembered where he had left it; and had found, as usual, that cigarettes were not the same. Scarcely detaching his mind from that of the character on whom he was working, he had pushed off in the punt to get it, thinking as he went, and comfortable in the certainty that Leo would do nothing to interrupt or detain him; she took other people’s work more seriously, if anything, than her own. He wandered absently over the grass, in no hurry, preserving by instinct the quiet that suited his mood, his feet falling softly in their rope-soled shoes. It was a pity, he thought, that a light was necessary to write by; his imagination was always more fertile in the dark. He might, in his preoccupation, have collided with the two standing shadowed under the climbing roses by the gate, if Leo had not laughed. At the sound he stopped, backing sharply against the stump of the apple-tree, and stood there for a moment to collect his thoughts. Three parts of his brain had been turned inwards, and what he saw seemed at first less real than its images.
