THE LIGHTHOUSE

with which she went. Lily squeezed her tubes
again. She attacked that problem of the hedge.
It was strange how clearly she saw her, stepping
with her usual quickness across fields among whose
folds, purplish and soft, among whose flowers,
hyacinths or lilies, she vanished. It was some
trick of the painter's eye. For days after she had
heard of her death she had seen her thus, putting
her wreath to her forehead and going unquestion-
ingly with her companion, a shadow, across the
fields. The sight, the phrase, had its power to
console. Wherever she happened to be, painting,
here, in the country or in London, the vision would
come to her, and her eyes, half closing, sought
something to base her vision on. She looked
down the railway carriage, the omnibus; took
a line from shoulder or cheek; looked at the
windows opposite; at Piccadilly, lamp-strung in
the evening. All had been part of the fields of
death. But always something—it might be a face,
a voice, a paper boy crying Standard^ News—
thrust through, snubbed her, waked her, required
and got in the end an effort of attention, so that
the vision must be perpetually remade. Now
again, moved as she was by some instinctive need
of distance and blue, she looked at the bay beneath
her, making hillocks of the blue bars of the waves,
and stony fields of the purpler spaces. Again she

279