CHAPTER VII

FROM A FAR COUNTRY Cynthia was kneading bread. As her arms moved automatically, moulding the spongy mass that half yielded to her touch and half resisted, she had the dazed sensation of one who, waking from a vivid dream, finds the actual dreamlike and unreal. But in Cynthia’s case she knew only too well which experience had been the illusion. Her mother had been buried the week before, but already her grief seemed to belong to some remote past, not that it had lost poignancy, but that it had been set aside, as all…