Have written am on my way home have been a fool stop love—and then that name as formal as a seal. He sat down. His head swam with nausea. He thought: if I had never written that other letter, If I had taken Helen at her word and gone away, how easily then life could have been arranged again. But he remembered his words in the last ten minutes, ‘I’ll always be here if you need me as long as I’m alive’—that constituted an oath as ineffaceable as the vow by the Ealing altar. The wind was coming up from the sea—the rains ended as they began with typhoons. The curtains blew in and he ran to the
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