with the women in black.... She remembered. That was in one of her three
dreams. Only what she saw now was incomplete. There had been something
more in the dream. Something had happened.

It happened half an hour later when she went out to find John in the
Convent garden where he was walking with the nuns. The garden shimmered
in a silver mist from the canal, the broad grass plots, the clipped
hedges, the cones and spikes of yew, the tall, feathery chrysanthemums,
the trailing bowers and arches, were netted and laced and webbed with the
silver mist. Down at the bottom of the path the forms of John and the
three women showed blurred and insubstantial and still.

Presently they emerged, solid and clear; the nuns in their black habits
and the raking white caps like wings that set them sailing along. They
were showing John their garden, taking a shy, gentle, absorbed
possession of him.

And as she came towards him John passed her without speaking. But his
face had turned to her with the look she had seen before. Eyes of hatred,
eyes that repudiated and betrayed her.

The nuns had stopped, courteously, to greet her; she fell behind with one
of them; the two others had overtaken John who had walked on, keeping up
his stiff, repudiating air.

The air, the turn of the head, the look that she had dreamed. Only in the
dream it had hurt her, and now she was hard and had no pain.

* * * * *