Manchurian Books

Surprisingly
I realised that behind all her hardness and severity she had loved me,
that I was the only thing she had ever loved and that until this moment
I had never loved her. And now she was there and deaf and blind to me,
pitifully defeated in her designs for me, covered from me so that she
could not know....
I dug my nails into the palms of my hands, I set my teeth, but tears
blinded me, sobs would have choked me had speech been required of me.
The old vicar read on, there came a mumbled response--and so on to the
end. I wept as it were internally, and only when we had come out of the
churchyard could I think and speak calmly again.
Stamped across this memory are the little black figures of my uncle and
Rabbits, telling Avebury, the sexton and undertaker, that "it had all
passed off very well--very well indeed."
VIII
That is the last I shall tell of Bladesover. The dropscene falls on
that, and it comes no more as an actual presence into this novel. I
did indeed go back there once again, but under circumstances quite
immaterial to my story.


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