Her whole soul applauded Michael, and yet below her applause was this heartache for him, the desire to be able to help him to bear the burden which must be so heavy, though he bore it so blithely. But in the very nature of things there was but one way in which she could help him, and in that she was powerless. She could not give him what he wanted. But she longed to be able to.
It was a morning of early March, and Michael, looking out from the dining-room window at the house in Curzon Street, where he had just breakfasted alone, was smitten with wonder and a secret ecstasy, for he suddenly saw and felt that it was winter no longer, but that spring had come. For the last week the skies had screamed with outrageous winds and had been populous with flocks of sullen clouds that discharged themselves in sleet and snowy rain, and half last night, for he had slept very badly, he had heard the dashing of showers, as of wind-driven spray, against the window-panes, and had listened to the fierce rattling of the frames. Towards morning he had slept, and during those hours it seemed that a new heaven and a new earth had come into being; vitally and essentially the world was a different affair altogether.
At the back of the house on to which these windows looked was a garden of some half acre, a square of somewhat sooty grass, bounded by high walls, with a few trees at the further end. Into it, too, had the message that thrilled through his bones penetrated, and this little oasis of doubtful grass and blackened shrubs had a totally different aspect to-day from that which it had worn all those weeks. The sparrows that had sat with fluffed-up feathers in corners sheltered from the gales, were suddenly busy and shrilly vocal, chirruping and dragging about straws, and flying from limb to limb of the trees with twigs in their beaks. For the first time he noticed that little verdant cabochons of folded leaf had globed themselves on the lilac bushes below the window, crocuses had budded, and in the garden beds had shot up the pushing spikes of bulbs, while in the sooty grass he could see specks and patches of vivid green, the first growth of the year.
He opened the window and strolled out. The whole taste and savour of the air was changed, and borne on the primrose-coloured sunshine came the smell of damp earth, no longer dead and reeking of the decay of autumn, but redolent with some new element, something fertile and fecund, something daintily, indefinably laden with the secret of life and restoration. The grey, lumpy clouds were gone, and instead chariots of dazzling white bowled along the infinite blue expanse, harnessed to the southwest wind. But, above all, the sparrows dragged straws to and fro, loudly chirruping. All spring was indexed there.