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influenza, leaves a huskiness. She walked off composedly enough, but, as the man saw, ran the last steps to her brother's side.
    Melba said, 'They're never apart. Not since Helen could crawl.'
    'Not a good life for a kiddie.' This was Barry, with complacency.
    'But they're company for one another. There's nothing here for young people.' With a gesture, Melba implicated the entire archipelago as far as the Kuriles. 'Even if my poor boy was able.'
    Brother and sister had been abroad since Christmas, in the custody of a British friend. A diagnosis had been made. There had then been the long voyage out. Their apprehension of the imminent landfall might be imagined: reunion, curtailment. Leith saw that the Driscolls used the daughter for the care of their son. And also that this abuse was as yet her sole salvation.
    In his room, he found letters on the table and sat on the bed to read them. He forgot the Driscolls, in favour of other discoveries of the day: the ascent coiled around green-combed terraces, and the last white sight of Ginger's ship; and his good, pleasant, irresolute driver.
    There was a brief letter from his father, which he put aside for reply. A notice from his bank was on excellent paper, ivory-coloured and headed by raised lettering in coal-black cursives: the first fine stationery he had handled in years. A scattering of postcards was a signal of dwindling correspondence — he had, for some people, been away too long. A good letter had been posted from Bombay by an army friend now sailing towards Hong Kong. A single sheet, from a woman who would soon join the postcard category, enclosed photographs: 'I was in Szechuan at the beginning of spring.' The snows blotched above, the blossoming below, and the steep village stepping to the river's edge. The quilted men and women at their work, smiling at the photographer with resigned surprise.
    If he were minded to feel homesick, it would have been for that.
    Leith's greatest preoccupation at this time was his work, the medium through which he conceived a future life. He had set himself to render consequences of war within an ancient and vanishing society. That visionary or preposterous undertaking had engrossed him for two years, and would in some degree influence the remainder of his days. His theme — of loss and disruption — was pervasive now throughout the world. With the sombre choice, there had come much happiness in far communities. There had been the singular, transcendent encounters. He had no wish to explicate or control. The collective scramble of soldiering had confirmed a need of solitude — a measure of which could be created at will, even among others. From events of war he had wrested the lonely elements of maturity. He wanted, now, discoveries to which he sensed himself accessible; that would alter him, as one is altered, involuntarily, by a great work of art or an effusion of silent knowledge.
    Aldred Leith had developed stoicism that might have been a temporary condition of his war, of his task and travels. He knew, however, that the capacity for affection must be kept current if it is not to diminish into postcards. And that responsiveness in youth is no guarantee against later dispassion. His father, in this, was something of a caution. In Oliver Leith, an intense, original lode of high feeling had been depleted: he was working, now, from a keen memory of authentic emotion. The son knew himself more resilient and less egotistical than the father — even if possessed, as he had always been given to understand, of less genius.
    When he had replied to everything but the good letter from Bombay, he went out and walked up the path to a shed that had been pointed out as a common room from which mail might be despatched. From that rise, one could look up to the original house on its screened plateau. He saw that it was by no means closed, and that one or two figures moved, in the late light, across its partitions. Aware that persistence would lead