Page:The Blind Bow-Boy (IA blindbowboy00vanv).pdf/233

 Dear Harold, I am glad to see you. Why haven't you been here before?

She was shocked by the boy's appearance. Deep grey circles had formed under his eyes. His cheek-bones seemed unnaturally prominent. He was thinner. And, Campaspe noted at once, he suggested, as usual, the dominant note of pathos. It was the one quality she had never been quite able to dissociate from him, or from any other very young person, for that matter. One never begins to be happy until one is thirty, she reflected, and then, sometimes, one only begins.

He did not seem able to muster sufficient poise to respond immediately to her greeting, and so she asked Frederika to bring out tea, and she moved freely about the garden, hoping to put him at his ease by the apparent carelessness of her manner. Her beloved Eros still aimed his bow at random and the nymph still lay prostrate on the marble sward, but the fountain had ceased to function and the basin was choked with yellow and red leaves, discarded by a neighbour's maple-tree. The pavement, too, was strewn with leaves, and the aged tortoise had burrowed under a heap of them in one corner. It was a setting replete with melancholy.

I wasn't sure you would want me, Harold replied hesitantly, at last.

He was pathetic.

Not want you! Of course, I wanted you. How, conceivably, could you get that idea?