He was eight days at home and they spent a lot of the time together. They had a new kind of intimacy; the world of men and affairs had altered for them both. Everything came to them at a fresh angle. They were dwellers in another atmosphere. The most commonplace actions meant much more; events once of comparatively large importance meant much less. She half suggested that they should go up on Sunday afternoon to Strathfieldsaye, but the idea evidently did not appeal to him and she did not press it. Still she threw out the hint, because it was an opportunity to let bygones be bygones and she was sure that he would meet with a good reception. A sense of justice impelled her to be grateful to her father, much as she disliked him; in his domineering way he had tried to make amends; all the same she was not sorry that Bill was determined to hold himself aloof. It was not exactly that he bore a grudge against her father; at the point he had reached men did not bear grudges, but he had some decided views on the matter and they gained in power by not being expressed.
On the afternoon of Wednesday, which was early closing day in Blackhampton, Bill insisted on taking Melia to the Art Gallery. It was in the historic low-roofed building in New Square--which dated from the Romans--known as the old Moot Hall. It was now the home of one of the finest collections of pictures in the country. Among ancient masterpieces and some modern ones were several characteristic examples of his friend, Stanning, R.A., whom he had carried dying into a dugout not four months ago.
Corporal Hollis had it from Sergeant Stanning's own lips that the best picture he had ever painted was hung in the middle room, and that it was not the Sharrow at Corfield Weir, which the Corporal himself admired so much, but the smaller, less ambitious piece called, "The Leaves of the Tree"--a picture of the woods up at Dibley in the sunlight of October, stripped by the winds of autumn, with the bent figure in the foreground of a very old man raking the dead leaves together.
They had no difficulty in finding it. "As the leaves of the trees are the lives of men." That legend on the gilt frame seemed to them both at that moment strangely, terribly prophetic. Bill did not tell Melia as they stood in front of the picture that he had risked his own life in a vain attempt to save the man who had painted it, nor did he tell her that the blood of the artist had dyed the sleeves of his tunic.