THE VISIT OF MISS NORTON (continued 2)

But the happiness of the evening, the closeness-up of the four to each other, the tremors they all transmitted, the cramp of inside laughter, remained with Lois, as though they had held hands tightly under the large oppression. And—under that pressure of laughter compact to bursting-point—a particular stored excitement of pride and pleasure, a jump of intimacy at each other’s voices and movements. And the awareness stayed when, afterwards, they had laughed themselves out and were empty and solemn, tinging their interchanges with unusual shyness. That supper marked a degree in her appreciation of Gerald—his crystalline niceness.

For Mr. Thompson, still with a little blancmange hanging off his moustache, got up and left them. And later Miss Thompson stood pulling down her skirt across her hips, when Gerald opened the door so beautifully that she had to go out through it, to perfect an experience. Then Livvy, to show what she thought of her family, got up and waltzed round the table, tugged open the window, ran on to the lawn and with unabated gentility jumped on all the croquet hoops, David following. And Gerald turned for the first time to look at Lois, who looked away. They poured out more barley-water and, in an ecstasy of bad manners, bubbled into their glasses. They went out and sat on the seat by the croquet lawn, under a bush of syringa. Waxy petals touched Lois’s arm stretched out along the back of the seat, the air smelt of almonds, moths came slanting out of the bush and glittered off on the dusk.

Miss Thompson declared it had been a pleasure, and had asked them to come again. Lois now said: “I should tell your aunt, she has so little to interest her; I am sure she would be wonderfully sympathetic.”

“I always find it difficult,” Livvy said, “to open the subject of marriage.” And as she looked down, looked significant, the word did flower over with implications, so that it was, to Lois, at once in a pit and upon a pinnacle that she leaned and frowned and dangled her garnet ring.

“If only David were more determined!”

“But aren’t you certain he wants to marry you?”

“Yes, but he needs to have it all arranged for him. Just because I’m such a capable girl.... Listen, Lois: if you were to be engaged to Gerald Lesworth it would in a kind of way set the ball rolling. Then I should say to my father—”

“Oh, but then I⁠—”

“Of course he may not ask you. But that being so, I should say to my father—”

“Ssh!”

Laurence was well into the drawing-room before he recognized Livvy’s shoulder-blades and saw her pink reflection nodding at him in a glass. He flushed with annoyance and bowed. There was ink on his forehead, between the eyebrows, where he had rubbed with the tip of his pen. “How d’you do,” he said and, to Lois: “Has Miss Norton started? Started—set out—gone to village? Eh?”

“Oh ... yes.”

“Pity. Did she seem to be ... waiting about at all?”

Livvy giggled. Lois said, oh no, she had not seemed to be waiting about. Why?

“Curiosity. I could have gone for her; I have nothing to do.”

“She hadn’t got anything to do either.”

“Naturally.” The two girls leaning shoulder to shoulder on the piano filled Laurence with an unutterable depression. He could not leave them. He went to a table of books, took up a book on Nigeria, looked intently into it and blew some dust from between the pages. He felt the only living thing had gone out of the house. He felt hungry, though it was not yet half-past eleven. He could not go upstairs and work, or in fact settle down to anything. He felt as though he were the weather: “Le temps, c’est moi!” He wished he were the sort of man who would go out to the yard and take the car to pieces. Marda was the only person who found him amusing—but perhaps he was not amusing, perhaps they were right. “Mrs. Montmorency did not sleep either,” he said. “Notice her eyes this morning?”

“Eh?” said Livvy.

“This is a dreadful house, Miss Thompson. I should not stay to lunch if I were you. Besides, it’s only mutton, I asked the cook. Lois, have you any foolscap? I thought I might write a novel.”

“Oh, do! Oh, how lovely! But I have no foolscap; ask Uncle Richard. He has some paper over from when he was going to write his memoirs.... Laurence, are you going to stay in here?”

“Well, I’d rather not.” It occurred to him that he might do worse than walk over to lunch with the Careys. There would be a freshness in their dullness and dampness after the dullness and dampness here, while his own would have a charm for them, a fertilizing strangeness. The households had not seen anything of each other for three days. Both families had driven over to Castle Trent to hear about the raid, but had missed each other by half an hour. There would be the raid to discuss, and how the Trents were taking it; also, the Careys lived well—at the worst there could be nothing worse than mutton. “I am going to lunch at Mount Isabel—any message to Nona?”

“Oh!” said Lois. Her eyes went dark with vivid and deep disappointment at the thought of anybody doing anything without her. She missed everything, no one would ever care, she would never marry. She blinked as Laurence went out and shut the door.

“Funny thing,” said Livvy, “the way your cousin blushes whenever he sees me.” She looked at herself in the tall glass and settled her side hair. “Now, Lois, what I always feel: a girl is only young once⁠—”

“I expect,” said Lois, “that that is all for the best.”

XIV

“THOUGH to tell you the truth,” said Lady Naylor, circulating among the begonia beds at Mount Isabel, “though I am in a way sorry, I am not altogether sorry that she is going.”

She glanced closely at Mrs. Carey’s profile, to see that her exact shade of meaning had been taken. Mrs. Carey nodded and wrinkled up her forehead, very profoundly. She was thinking about something else. She stooped, pulled off three dead begonias and crumpled them into her pocket.

“Because if that should be what she is going to do, I should rather she did not do it with us. For one thing, the Lawes are relations, they are cousins to a cousin of mine by marriage. One does not know what they might not say about influence. Though no one could interfere less than I do, one never knows, does one, what might go round through the family? And really I am superstitious about her visits, already this time she has lost a suitcase. One cannot help feeling responsible.”

“But are you certain,” asked Mrs. Carey, looking critically round this part of her garden as though she were wishing to have it all up and replant it again, “that she is going to break it off?”

“I shouldn’t like to say. She has got into a kind of a nervous habit of sending telegrams. Up and down, up and down all day to the village. Surely that is abnormal in an engaged girl? It is not even as if they were buying a house or anything. It’s bound to be so unintimate—unless she does not consider the post-mistress, and I do think really she ought to because it is our post-mistress. And another thing—I don’t really know that I ought to speak of this, but I really cannot discuss it with poor little Francie—I don’t think she has at all a good effect on Hugo. You know what he’s like usually? Well, he’s quite different. Quite empressé.... But I don’t expect there is anything in that really. One so easily says too much.”

She paused, sighed and waited. Mrs. Carey looked at her mildly. “Oh?” she said. “Oh yes. But how do you mean?”

“I know Francie notices; I know she is unhappy. Of course she always is unhappy, but she’s unhappy now in a different way. Of course one hates to say it, but one does know what Hugo is ...”

“Oh—is he really?” said Mrs. Carey, startled.

“What Hugo needs is real trouble. Now if poor little Francie died⁠—”

“Is she seriously⁠—?”

“No, I feel that he will die first, he has just that way of avoiding things. Look how he didn’t marry Laura.... However, I expect I am being quite ridiculous; I hate to exaggerate—it is from having Laurence so much in the house. Have you noticed how clever young men⁠—? I believe he’s worse in England; they think him amusing. Of course there is no harm in Marda; one has known her since she was little. She’s only wild—two of her uncles were like that. Shall you ever forget how her knee bled that afternoon? You know, I didn’t give another children’s party for three years!”

Coming to the edge of the lawn, they looked down on a court where Marda, Lois, Laurence and Nona Carey were playing tennis. The two ladies, at peace and with the faint self-congratulation with which one generation watches another, gazed with a statuesque remoteness over the foreground. “She is, somehow, I don’t know ... charming,” said Mrs. Carey, as Marda and Lois crossed and recrossed. “Shall we go round before tea and look at the dahlias? I wanted to ask you ...”

They turned, having cast an imposing shadow over the consciousness of the players, and went softly, heavily over the grass to the iron door of the garden. It seemed natural to Mrs. Carey, half dissolved in the brightness and depth of the afternoon, that Hugo should be attracted towards a fellow-visitor; such things came on and passed, transitory as a summer. She did not see that there was anything one need do; she said so to Lady Naylor.

The fine weather was back again. Over the roof of Mount Isabel a mountain sheathed in pink air looked gentle and distant. Light slid over the heavy burnished trees; the cream façade of the house was like cardboard, high and confident in the sun—a house without weight, an appearance less actual than the begonias’ scarlet and wax-pink flesh. Begonias, burning in an impatience of colour, crowded over the edge of heart-shaped beds. As the four came up from the court there was silence over the sheen of grass. Then a maid leaned out from the dark through the drawing-room window sounding the brass tea-gong: a minor note.

Marda perhaps was wild, like her uncles, but not inconsiderate. She had realized, almost upon arrival, that the worst thing she could do would be to attract Mr. Montmorency. To be loved by him would be the culminating disaster of her unfortunate visits. The idea seemed to her silly—she could not think of herself as fatal—but rooted itself during a fit of extreme apprehension induced by the loss of her suitcase. She dreaded the suitcase might not be the close of her record; having made the acquaintance of Hugo she saw it would not be. She might not be fatal, but here she was certainly fated. She thought: “Damn him!” with conscious injustice and drew on every resource, all that might once have been called the arts of her sex to repel, to annoy and to bore him. That day of the beech walk, in old Dannie’s cottage, she had had in a flash the measure of her unsuccess. Persistently charmless, untiring in her attempts not to please, she had still to retreat, resentful, upon a female wariness, guardedness, circumspection she had always despised. Her reward: at the foot of the stairs at bedtime, a contact of finger-tips—all of himself in the touch—as he gave her her candlestick: a startled look over the flame. And as the four candles went up with the ladies, drawing a tide of shadow, she and Lois had turned at a turn of the stairs to see him still there, looking up from the staggering mounting dark. She took Lois’s arm.

That was the night he did not sleep, and Lois did not sleep either.

To-day, Smith had ridden over to Mount Isabel for tea and Nona. He stood smiling over the glittering tray, in the high dark-yellow shadows, pleased but anonymous. He was a man whose name one could not remember. But his appearance agitated Mrs. Carey, who recalled that he did not eat any tea. She hoped it would all be all right.

She said to Marda distractedly: “I am glad you are going to be happy: I hope you will be really, really married.”

“Thank you so much,” said Marda. “I am sure I shall be.”

“Of course,” continued Mrs. Carey, still watching Smith, “I ought not to congratulate him, I ought to congratulate you.”

“I am very fortunate.”

“Oh no, I don’t mean that at all. Show me your lovely ring—oh, you haven’t got it on. But I expect you have got a lovely ring. Mr. Smith, I hope you will play tennis?”

But Smith, who did not feel like tennis, had not brought shoes. Tennis was not his idea at all. He had thought perhaps a little walk in the garden, a few plums ... And Nona got up very pink and conscious and circulated with plates of cake. She knew that she must throw off people like Mr. Smith because next summer she was to be presented and have a season in London. Lady Naylor could not help raising her eyebrows at Mrs. Carey.

“Such a pity,” remarked Mrs. Carey, as they slid up arm-chairs to the tea-table, “you didn’t bring over the Montmorencys. Wouldn’t they come?”

“He might have come,” said Laurence, “but as I am not allowed to drive there was not room in the car. There were too many of us.”

“Never mind,” said Marda. “I am going on Saturday.”

“Oh no, you aren’t!” cried Lois, and added respectfully: “Don’t be so silly.”

Lady Naylor sighed. “Unfortunately, Marda must go back to England. I don’t know what we shall do without her....”

“Do you like England?” said Nona Carey, moving away from Smith. “Are you really going to live there? I always think it’s so new-looking. But of course there’s a great deal going on.... Where do you live, Mr. Smith?”

“Eastbourne.”

Though Lady Naylor said at once that that must be very bracing, Smith wilted under a general commiseration. He recrossed his legs, frowned at the toe of his shoe and said he thought sometimes of going to East Africa. A forlorn and slighted feeling the announcement of Marda’s departure cast over them was heightened by this proposed defection of Smith’s. Lady Naylor remarked disparagingly that that would be rather lonely, while Mrs. Carey, seeing Smith at once against hot African skies in a silhouette of nobility, felt they had been unkind and asked him to come over here on the sofa and tell her about himself. He told her. Nona sat and twirled on the music stool.

“Smith,” said Laurence, “you ought to stay and defend us.” And Smith had to promise he would not leave the Army and go to East Africa till they were all settled.

But to Laurence and Lois this all had already a ring of the past. They both had a sense of detention, of a prologue being played out too lengthily, with unnecessary stress, a wasteful attention to detail. Apart, but not quite unaware of each other, queerly linked by antagonism, they both sat eating tea with dissatisfaction, resentful at giving so much of themselves to what was to be forgotten. The day was featureless, a stock pattern day of late summer, blandly insensitive to their imprints. The yellow sun—slanting in under the blinds on full-bosomed silver, hands balancing Worcester, dogs poking up wistfully from under the cloth—seemed old, used, filtering from the surplus of some happy fulfilment; while, unapproachably elsewhere, something went by without them.

Marda wanted more tea—but they were all distracted, an argument raged round Smith. “You must, of course, go on Saturday?” said Laurence, taking her cup. “Oh yes—why?” She leaned back from the bar of sun, into the shade of the curtains. Shadow gave transparency to her colours; its brown clarity hardened her face revealingly so that she was exposed a moment, in her anxiety, without the defence of manner. Her green linen dress went ghostly against the cretonne’s rather jarring florescence.

“Just when it’s fine,” said Laurence, banal with sincerity.

“That is because I’m going.”

He listened a moment and, as the uproar of argument was sustained, said quickly: “Lois and I aren’t a good addition—the Montmorencys think so. Is that what bored you? Nobody’s ever gone so soon. There was a walk I wanted to take you.” He rattled the cup and saucer at her in desperation. “I think you make a mistake, going.”

“Oh, I expect so, but⁠—”

“Look at Lois, her eyes are starting out of her head. When you’ve gone, she’ll go up and cry on your bed. It will fill her mornings.”

“Oh, shut up, she can hear you.”

“No,” said Laurence, “she can’t, though she’s trying to. I’m not so sorry, but I do think it’s unimaginative of you going. Why have you got to see Mr. Lawe? I mean, quite dispassionately, isn’t there heaps of time for him?... You see,” concluded Laurence, “I am enraged—by all this—past snubbing-point.”

“I want some more tea,” said Marda, “more than anything in the world.”

Unable to attract the attention of their hostess, Laurence leaned over the tray and took the teapot. On his way back to Marda he guessed from the unmoving intentness with which she was staring out at the begonias—they gave back little vermilion flecks to her eyes—that there was some one at the bottom of this and that it was Mr. Montmorency. He had learnt—from leaning out of his window while his aunt talked to Mrs. Montmorency down on the steps—that they all thought she contemplated breaking off her engagement. Personally he thought this improbable. Mr. Montmorency himself was the supreme objection; but also she would be getting herself a good home and what went with it—money, assurance and scope. He himself only wished he could do so as easily. He now stood above her holding the cup of tea and could have counted three before she turned round. But then—oh, the waste of his comprehension—he saw she was laughing.

She had laughed at a thought of the subdued surprise with which they would come to her wedding; barely dressed as befitted because of that unshaken disbelief in her; buttoning, till well up the aisle, their white gloves. But the origin of their disbelief did not seem to her funny; had acquired for her, in fact, a tragic vulgarity. So that she did not explain the joke to Laurence; she thanked him and drank the tea, which was all wrong.

Out, at last, through the window, dazzled, threading and separating between the flower-beds, the party dispersed with their cigarettes. Large to themselves, to each other graduating from a little below life-size to an eye from the mountain ant-like—but smaller and less directed—or like beads tipped out. A sense of exposure, of being offered without resistance to some ironic un-curiosity, made Laurence look up at the mountain over the roof of the house. In some gaze—of a man’s up there hiding, watching among the clefts and ridges—they seemed held, included and to have their only being. The sense of a watcher, reserve of energy and intention, abashed Laurence, who turned from the mountain. But the unavoidable and containing stare impinged to the point of a transformation upon the social figures with their orderly, knitted shadows, the well-groomed grass and the beds, worked out in this pattern.

Driving home, tightly packed hip to hip in the back of the car between Marda and Lois, and bumping conjointly over the inequalities of the road, Lady Naylor told them of a discovery she had made. Mrs. Carey, also, did not understand modern young people. They seemed, Mrs. Carey had said, to have no idealism, no sense of adventure, they thought so much of their comfort⁠— Possibly Mrs. Carey was wrong? But almost she thought she agreed with her. In their youth, Mrs. Carey and she would have been deeply excited by all that was happening round them. Lady Naylor thought all young people ought to be rebels; she herself had certainly been a rebel. But since the War, they had never ceased mouching. She herself had had a deep sense of poetry; she remembered going to sleep with Shelley under her pillow. She used to walk alone in the mountains and hated coming in to meals. Mrs. Carey had noticed that Nona would not miss a meal for anything—she was unpunctual always, but never absent. But perhaps Mrs. Carey misjudged the girl? Mrs. Carey and she had passed through periods of profound unhappiness. And yet their youth was a golden period; they would not have missed it. It did seem a pity, they both had agreed, to be born middle-aged.

These last remarks were directed with a degree of resentment at Laurence’s back view, in the front of the car by the chauffeur. His ears, of unfortunate conformation, curled out semi-transparent against the evening light. Laurence said nothing, but thought; he must write that novel, for here lay a gold-mine (then Spain and those first editions, a Picasso and curtains for his rooms). He would vindicate modern young people for his aunt and her generation. Only he did not know if he should write about cocktail parties or whimsical undergraduates.

XV

HUGO was dumb, his companion inattentive to him in silence. They walked on the turf of the Darra valley, along the edge of the water: he beat with his stick at the gold, strident ragwort. At every flash of the stick she glanced in surprise, but did not say: “Spare them.” Lois, straggling behind, threw in twig after twig to the swollen, hurrying Darra; ran a short way with each in intense excitement, lost it and threw in another. She seemed absorbed but remotely dependent, like one of the dogs. If she had fallen in with a loud enough splash and a cry she might have distracted the couple ahead, but she was surefooted and not quite certain enough of herself to fall in on purpose.

Recollections of Laura were now wiped for him from the startlingly green valley, leaving the scene dull. Not a turn of the rocks with the river, not a break-down of turf along the brink, not the Norman keep with perishing corners (where they leaned and quarrelled till Laura had wished aloud it would fall on them) gave back to him what they had taken of that eroding companionship. He and she might never have come here; they were disowned. The sharp rocks breaking out from the turf, the impassive speed of the water were naked and had to be seen as themselves, in some relation excluding him; like country seen from the train, without past or future. And, having given proof of her impotence to be even here, Laura shrank and drew in her nimbus, leaving only—as in some rediscovered diary of a forgotten year—a few cryptic records, walks, some appointments kept, letters received and posted.

He now guessed, in fact, he had never loved her. Shocked but with an enlivening sense of detachment, he turned to Marda—but still had nothing to say. She walked rather too quickly beside him, with long steps. She was leaving to-morrow; she was to be in England indefinitely: she seemed content. And for this, his anger released from Laura, settled upon her. He loved her: a sense of himself rushed up, filling the valley. The rocks again were transmuted: broken all over in planes of light, a defeated sharpness, they were no more limestone.

“Mrs. Montmorency knows Leslie’s aunt,” said Marda suddenly. “Do you? It seems so extraordinary?”

“If I ever did I’ve forgotten her.”

“She’s so nice.”

“I have no doubt.”

“Let’s ask Lois to come and talk to us.”

“She seems quite happy. Where do you go—after to-morrow?”

“Oh, Kent. Doesn’t it seem extraordinary?”

Having given the matter rather too marked attention, he pronounced that her sense of the extraordinary seemed to him extravagant. She agreed there did seem to be some disparity in their outlook. “Disparity!” he cried out. “Everything! What a good thing we shall never need to understand each other.”

“I never try to understand anybody,” she said mildly.

“No, indeed,” he replied with sarcasm. “Who is worth it?”

At this she looked back again for Lois. She remembered Francie, seeing them off from the steps in a pink blouse, and the look that fluttered after them down the avenue. No wonder Francie looked like a windflower—her husband had this unfortunate ability to be young at any time. His unordered moods gave him the churlishness of a schoolboy; his silliness embarrassed her. Yet anger did illuminate him becomingly: brighter and harder, for the first time he could be conceived as lovable. Though in this personal atmosphere generated by his temper she was feeling least herself, most nearly negative.

“I should like to go over there,” she said, looking across the water to where trees began on a skyline and went down steeply, powdered yellow with light on their tops.

“We can’t,” he said, triumphant, “the stepping-stones are covered.” He showed her a line of faint scars, a hesitation across the current.

“I never thought of there being stepping-stones. I only wanted to cross because we couldn’t. Why does one always seem to be on the wrong side?”

“I should have thought you never were—don’t you even make rather a point of that?”

She was exasperated past caution. “Mr. Montmorency, what is the matter?”

Seeing that he had overreached himself, been absurd, he raised his eyebrows in courteous mystification—“Matter?”—did not reply but began talking about his travels—the greenest river he knew was the Ain, he said; had she ever looked down on the Ain?—an appointment he had held in the North (a deterrent from travel), his five years in London (release from the North), a business enterprise with which he had once been connected. It had never been sound, he now saw, he said, but had once had a chance of success. She took him as he had intended, as the practical man manqué. They discussed the question of Canada, whether he would have succeeded. She thought, emphatically, it was a pity he had not tried. “But my wife’s health⁠—” “Oh yes, Mrs. Montmorency ...”

“The fact is, I have not made her happy.”

“She would always be happy a little; she is wonderfully unselfish.”

“Do you mean⁠—”

“Oh, what is that? The ghost of a Palace Hotel?”

The mill startled them all, staring, light-eyed, ghoulishly, round a bend of the valley. Lois had to come hurrying up to explain how it frightened her. In fact, she wouldn’t for worlds go into it but liked going as near as she dared. It was a fear she didn’t want to get over, a kind of deliciousness. These dead mills—the country was full of them, never quite stripped and whitened to skeletons’ decency: like corpses at their most horrible. “Another,” Hugo declared, “of our national grievances. English law strangled the⁠—” But Lois insisted on hurrying: she and Marda were now well ahead.

The river darkened and thundered towards the mill-race, light came full on the high façade of decay. Incredible in its loneliness, roofless, floorless, beams criss-crossing dank interior daylight, the whole place tottered, fit to crash at a breath. Hinges rustily bled where a door had been wrenched away; up six stories panes still tattered the daylight. Mounting the tree-crowded, steep slope some roofless cottages nestled under the flank of the mill with sinister pathos. A track going up the hill from the gateless gateway perished among the trees from disuse. Banal enough in life to have closed this valley to the imagination, the dead mill now entered the democracy of ghostliness, equalled broken palaces in futility and sadness; was transfigured by some response of the spirit, showing not the decline of its meanness, simply decline; took on all of the past to which it had given nothing.

Rooks disturbed the trees, disturbed the echoes. “Don’t go in!” cried Lois and clutched Marda’s arm convulsively.

“Come on,” said Marda, “I feel demoralized, girlish. Let’s hide from Mr. Montmorency.” Lois shied through the gateway with more than affected nervousness. This was her nightmare: brittle, staring ruins. Mr. Montmorency, disgruntled, still dawdled by the river; the idea of escape appeared irresistible. But the scene was strangely set for a Watteau interlude. Inside the mill door, a high surge of nettles; one beam had rotted and come down, there was some debris of the roof.

“If he starts shouting,” Lois said, apprehensive, “he’ll certainly bring the mill down. Oh, I can’t come in, oh, I can’t possibly. Oh, it’s beastly here; I feel sick. I think you are quite mad!”

“I think you’re a shocking little coward.”

“I’m not afraid of anything reasonable. But I’m simply nervous, one can’t help that.”

“Come in through that door.”

“But it’s so high.”

Marda put an arm round her waist, and in an ecstasy at this compulsion Lois entered the mill. Fear heightened her gratification; she welcomed its inrush, letting her look climb the scabby and livid walls to the frightful stare of the sky. Cracks ran down; she expected, now with detachment, to see them widen, to see the walls peel back from a cleft—like the House of Usher’s.

“Hate it?” said Marda.

“You’d make me do anything.”

The sun cast in through the window sockets some wild gold squares twisted by the beams; grasses along the windows trembled in light. Marda turned and went picking her way through the nettles; there was a further door, into darkness—somewhere, a roof still held. “Marda, help: here’s a dead crow!” “Tchch!”

“But it’s very dead!” Shuddering exaggeratedly, leaping in a scared way over the nettles, Lois also made for the dark doorway, eager for comment, contempt, consolation. She was a little idiot—appealing, she felt quite certain, to a particular tenderness.

In the dark of a lean-to, Marda was moving dimly. “Stairs!” she exclaimed with interest. Then she was back in a flash and stood in the door, barring it. She stood intently; menace contracted about her attitude.

“What?” whispered Lois.

“Ssh—some one’s asleep here.”

“Perhaps they’re dead?” She stared past Marda’s shoulder into the darkness, and, desirous, laughed, then clapped the back of a hand to her mouth—unnatural gesture, adequate to the drama. Gradually, she was able to see a man lying face down, arms spread out; a coat rolled into a pillow under his face which twisted sideways a little to let him breathe. One fist, clenched loosely, strayed to a clump of nettles; the knuckles must have been stung quite white. He could not feel the nettles—one had to imagine sleep like that! Behind him, stairs went up into visibility, to a gash of daylight.

Ashamed, the two young women stood elbow to elbow. Marda stepped back, some plaster crackled under her heel.

“What’s that?” said the man softly.

“Come away quickly—come⁠—”

But the man rolled over and sat up, still in the calm of sleep. “Stay there,” he said, almost persuasively: a pistol bore the persuasion out. They were embarrassed by this curious confrontation. Neither of them had seen a pistol at this angle; it was short-looking, scarcely more than a button. The man sat looking at them with calculating intentness, like a monkey, then got up slowly: the pistol maintained its direction.

“Don’t be silly,” said Marda. “Go to sleep again. We’re not⁠—”

“Are there any more of yez?”

“One—not interested either. Better let us go now, there will be less talk.”

“We’re just out for a walk,” said Lois, surprised at her own voice.

“Indeed,” said the man. “It is a grand evening for a walk no doubt. Is it from Castle Trent y’are?”

“Danielstown.”

The man’s eyes went from one to the other, and remained ironically between them. His face was metal-blue in the dusk and seemed numbed into immobility. “It is time,” he said, “that yourselves gave up walking. If you have nothing better to do, you had better keep in the house while y’have it.”

Marda, a hand on the frame of the doorway, remained unmoved, but Lois could not but agree with him. She felt quite ruled out, there was nothing at all for her here. She had better be going—but where? She thought: “I must marry Gerald.” But meanwhile Marda, holding her arm all the time, had softly, satirically pressed it. They could not but feel framed, rather conscious, as though confronting a camera. The man, who did not cease to regard them with uneasy dislike, asked which way they had come, whom they had met, if they had observed any movement of soldiers about the country. He remained dissatisfied; evidently they had the appearance of liars.

Meanwhile Mr. Montmorency, suspicious of merriment somewhere and determined to humour no one, had sat down to smoke on a parapet. At its base the bank descended; the river rushed loudly, dark with its own urgency, under his dangling feet. The mill behind affected him like a sense of the future; an unpleasant sensation of being tottered over. Split light, like hands, was dragged past to the mill-race, clawed at the brink and went down in destruction. He looked at the opposite hill, its distinct and peaceful trees. Marda belonged there and might be imagined composedly walking. Knocking some ash off, he leaned forward and groaned at the intervening water—“On the wrong side”⁠— He missed Francie; there welled up in him one great complaint to Francie. She—selfless woman—would non-committally rustle; some tender fidgeting always relieved her intentness of listening. Distressed for her husband, she would let out little sighs. He would tell her everything.... Yet he could not, for Marda was everywhere present, a clear ruddy-white mask of surprise. She impinged on the whole of him, on his most intimate sense of himself, with her cool sombre amusement. Had she a ghost everywhere?—there was something of her in Francie.

“It is like this,” he began to rehearse, “what I need is⁠—”

A shot, making rings in the silence. Eardrums throbbing, he gathered up the reverberations with incredulity. A battle—a death in the mill? Whose death? He leapt to one thought, a flash of relief in the panic. The front of the mill—he ran round to it—grinned with vacancy: corpse of an idiot. He steadied himself in the door, watched his cigarette drop into the nettles, then stumbled in over the debris. A crow’s flight, stooping wildly among the rafters, dislodged a trickle of plaster. He paused in the well of ruin, terrified for them all. But the crow swerved out through the roof.

“Marda!”

“All right,” said Lois. They appeared in a doorway and looked at him gravely, rather suspiciously. Marda put up a hand to her mouth—in an incredible half-glimpse, he thought he saw blood round the lips.

Something released in his voice, he said: “Marda—for God’s sake—”

Lois, as though the mill were falling, went white, then crimson. He had, distantly, some apprehension of an emotional shock. Marda, perplexedly, continued sucking her hand. Then she took Lois’s handkerchief, dabbed at her knuckles, wiped the blood from her lips—where no more came—returned to her knuckles. “I have lost some skin,” she said at last resentfully. “Just, a pistol went off—you heard?—by accident. I seem to have lost some pieces of skin.”

“Let me go past,” he said violently.

“We swore—” began Lois.

“Some one went upstairs backward, not very sensibly, not having eaten much for four days. There was some plaster—the pistol went off, naturally. It was silly, really. Look at my beastly hand—I was holding on to the door.”

“Let me get past—”

“But we swore, Mr. Montmorency—”

“You deserve to be shot!” He turned in a manner terrifying to all of them—most of all to himself—on this interruption. “You don’t seem to see, you seem to have no conception—”

“Then why sit there and smoke?” said Lois, trembling. “I saw you—you and your old conceptions.”

“Shut up,” said Marda, “oh, do shut up!”

“Don’t stand there, let me go past; I’ll⁠—”

“Oh, do let’s talk about something else⁠—”

“We swore,” went on Lois priggishly. “There never was anybody, we never saw anybody, you never heard⁠—”

But nobody listened. Vaguely, he waved her silent.

“The fact is,” said Marda, “we are neither of us good at explosions. Perhaps if we sat down and thought it over? Perhaps if you went for a walk—not up in the trees?”

“No more hide-and-go-seek,” he said, playful with fury. “Still bleeding⁠—?”

“Not like I can—I have rather a high standard. Do you remember the scraper? No, I might have done—this—on the broken edge of a slate: it will be the edge of a slate if you don’t mind. And, being me, it was bound to happen.”

He was set on transgressing the decencies. “Don’t you realize you might have been⁠—”

Marda laughed, coming out through the door of the mill beside him. He looked at her lips—no higher—angrily—burningly. Lois looked quickly away. She thought how the very suggestion of death brought this awful unprivacy.

They took his place on the parapet. Warily, they watched him walk back the way they had come, with effort, as though breasting a current. Lois took up his forgotten matchbox, shook it and put it away in her pocket. Their sex was a stronghold, they had to acknowledge silently; traditionally, one could always retreat on collapse. Mr. Montmorency having taken away with him any element of agitation, they were left with a particular sort of shyness.

“How one talks!” said Marda.

Lois tied up the hand, she said it seemed like Providence that her handkerchief should be clean to-day. Marda’s was coloured, that would never have done. One had always heard that dye ran into the blood.

“I don’t think it would,” said Marda. “It boils, it is really a good handkerchief.... This is the worst of big hands.”

“I suppose they are rather big.”

“Sorry we went in?”

“No.”

“You are being nice to me.... One won’t be girlish again—I think, as a matter of fact, we were being goatish.”

“But I’ve had a ... a revelation,” said Lois. She bent forward over the river, felt streaks of light fly over her face and felt that speech did not matter when so much was being carried past. “About Mr. Montmorency ... he’s being awful about you, isn’t he?”

The statement, almost a query, fluttered up at the end. But Marda’s face was inscrutable with reflections.

“About you. I had no idea—I was too damned innocent,” she explained with precision—“till we all stood in there and shouted.—Hear him tell me I ought to be shot?”

“He was all—dishevelled. He had to be adequate.”

“Oh, I didn’t mind. But, I mean, aren’t you rather—embarrassed?”

“One can’t help things.”

“I was awful, I said, ‘You and your old conceptions.’ They are rather old, aren’t they?... I mean, really: he was in love with my mother.”

“Well, I’m going away, aren’t I?”

“But, I mean, what is the good of this? It doesn’t make anything.”

Marda said, inconsequent: “I hope I shall have some children; I should hate to be barren.”

“Once I really meant to love him, but it would never have done.”

Marda leant against Lois’s shoulder. “You are wonderful!”

“Not so protected as you imagine.”

“Nothing gets past your imagination.”

“I wish,” said Lois thoughtfully, “I had really been shot. But I couldn’t be.” Later she added: “I’m sorry I said that about Mr. Montmorency. What will become of him?”

“Nothing.”

“I’m glad he wasn’t my father.”

“He couldn’t be anything’s father.”

“Where shall you be this time to-morrow?”

“In the train.”

“Funny,” said Lois. “Queer.” Her heart thumped, she looked at her watch. “Half-past six,” she said. “It’s harder, for some reason, to imagine what I’ll be doing or where I shall be.”

“A nice walk with Laurence, a nice cheerful squabble. If you want something to talk about, talk about me.”

“No, no, I mean ... No.” She looked up from the water. “You know,” she said, “all this has quite stopped any excitement for me about the mill. It’s a loss, really. I don’t think I’ll come down this part of the river again.... Will you have to tell Leslie? I don’t think you ought to: a swear is a swear, isn’t it, even in England.”

Nothing would have induced Marda to confirm Leslie’s opinion that her country was dangerous as well as demoralizing. He hated to think of even his aunts at that side of the Channel. She expected, some forty-eight hours ahead, to be walking with him in a clipped and traditional garden, in Kentish light. Under these influences, she would be giving account of herself. Leslie’s attention, his straight grey gaze, were to modify these wandering weeks of her own incalculably, not a value could fail to be affected by him. So much of herself that was fluid must, too, be moulded by his idea of her. Essentials were fixed and localized by their being together—to become as the bricks and wall-paper of a home.

At present, the mill was behind her, tattered and irrelevantly startling, like a dream of two nights ago. And Lois kept turning upon her a tragic and obstinate gaze: she could sense a persistence of Leslie upon the mental scene. Lois said, but defeatedly: “He is certain to be suspicious.”

“I certainly won’t tell.”

“So it will be a secret?”

“A perfect secret.”

“Thank you so much,” said Lois. As though breaking a spell, she shifted away down the parapet, put her feet to the ground, and was surprised to feel her legs trembling under her. “Here,” she said generously, “comes Mr. Montmorency.”

He came: “with demurest of footfalls.” They smiled and shouted along the bank. Yes, they could come now; yes, they were feeling splendid. “Shan’t we be late for dinner?”

“That is impossible,” shouted Mr. Montmorency, who was coming back to them looking formal and pleasant.

XVI

MARDA was not due to leave until after lunch, but throughout that morning they were all distressed and sympathetic, could not settle down to anything, walked about the house. Every time Lady Naylor saw Marda she asked her if she ought not to be packing, and while Marda packed, with her door open, Lady Naylor kept looking in to remark how sad it was to see her thus engaged. Francie sat and sewed in the ante-room, looking anxiously up whenever anyone passed. The rain fell, the windows were open, the rooms smelt of window-sills. Francie rolled up her work with a sigh and went up to tell Marda how sorry she was about the rain.

“You’ll have a wet drive,” she said.

“But the hood works,” said Marda, folding together the sleeves of a scarlet dress.

“But rain is so sad when one’s going away. Nothing, I mean but a train to arrive at.”

“But I really like trains: I am always talked to.”

“Hugo will be so sorry, he has so much enjoyed talking to you.”

“It’s been very nice of him.”

Sir Richard looked up Marda’s train in a May time-table and was worried because he could not find it. Had she really any proof, he came up to inquire, that it had been put on since? Would she not be wiser to catch the 12.30 and have plenty of time for dinner in Dublin? Also, what was he to do about her suitcase if it ever turned up? But he almost feared now it would never turn up. He sighed and went back to the library.

Laurence sat in his room with a book with the door open; he could see across the landing into Marda’s room. Evidently she could not make up her mind which hat to travel in: she tried on three and looked at herself in each. He did not care for her looks or her clothes, really; both were over-assured. But then he could not recall whose looks or whose clothes he did care for. Finally, he went across to say he did not want South Wind back, she could keep it to leave in the train, or simply pack it.

“Oh, thank you,” she said; “do write my name in it.”

He recoiled at this awful suggestion.

Her room had all come to pieces—dresses swirled on the bed, hats perched everywhere; she had lost the wedge from the mirror so that it wagged right forward, showing its blank side. She was taking more from the house than herself and her luggage.

“You will have a wet drive.”

“The hood works,” said Marda mechanically, throwing some rolled-up stockings out to make room for some shoes.

“Hasn’t Lois been up?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What can she be doing?”

“Last time I saw her she was bouncing a tennis ball on the dining-room wall between the portraits. She says she has not much to do at present.”

“Anything I can⁠—”

“Oh, if you’d write my labels⁠—”

“I will indeed, but I hate block printing—need they⁠—?”

“Well, I’m afraid I would rather⁠—”

“Remarkable orange labels,” said Laurence, taking the packet from her politely.

“Here is Livvy Thompson,” he added, looking out of the window. “She must have ridden over to say good-bye.”

“But I don’t know her.”

“She doesn’t know that: you have met.”

Marda leaned out and called her good-byes to Livvy, who waved and shouted up to her that she would have a very wet drive. Marda withdrew, shutting the window abruptly.

“I am sorry,” said Laurence, “that our young men will not have a chance to say good-bye to you.”

“I’ve only met one of them—Gerald.”

“Oh yes, you weren’t here for our last party. What a very short time you have been here.... I hope you’ll come back again soon—with your husband?”

“Thank you, it’s very kind of you.”

Laurence bowed and went away with the labels.

When Lois heard Livvy’s voice on the steps she fled to the back of the house and hid in a box-room. Sir Richard had to tell Livvy he did not know where she was; last time he had seen her she had been sorting out some packs of old playing-cards in the drawing-room and seemed very busy. Livvy was much disappointed; however, she took her horse round, then sat in the hall to wait.

Lady Naylor—who had spared her attention to Marda with difficulty: this was a busy morning—was agitated by this development. She stood at the foot of the stairs, calling Lois.

“She doesn’t seem to be anywhere,” Francie at last called helpfully, from the ante-room.

“But Livvy Thompson is sitting in the hall.”

“Ask Hugo to find her.”

“I can’t find him either.”

“Perhaps they have both gone out to the garden?”

“Not in all this rain.”

Lady Naylor sighed, gathered up two of the kitchen kittens that were trespassing on the stairs and plunged away through a swing door. It was twenty to twelve: extraordinary how one’s mornings went! Lunch was to be unnaturally early because of Marda’s departure: evidently, Livvy would, remain for it. She looked reproachfully into the library. But there Sir Richard was engaged with the herd, discussing the Darramore pig fair.

Meanwhile Lois was very melancholy in the box-room. The window was dark with ivy, she could not see out. The room was too damp for the storage of trunks that were not finished with anyhow; mustiness came from her mother’s old vaulted trunks and from a stack of crushed cardboard boxes. On the whitewash, her mother, to whom also the box-room had been familiar, had written L. N.; L. N., and left an insulting drawing of somebody, probably Hugo. She had scrawled with passion; she had never been able to draw. Lois looked, and strained after feeling, but felt nothing. Her problem was, not only how to get out unseen, but why, to what purpose?

She did not really know Marda well; to go up and offer to help her pack would surely appear unnatural? Or worse, one might seem to be taking advantage of yesterday? One had been passingly intimate under the pistol’s little acute, pig eye—but one had not spoken again of it. If she were free, she could search the rooms for something that looked plausibly Marda’s—a magazine, a handkerchief—and bring it up. But then Livvy was unavoidable, varnished up to the height of a shine with love and bursting open with confidences like a cotton-pod. She was appalled by these thoughts of Livvy.

But Livvy was privileged. If she chose to announce her engagement even Sir Richard must stop and listen. It was a passport at any frontier, that kind of announcement. Spurred by an impulse she did not examine, Lois picked up two cardboard lids and with infinite breathlessness crept from the box-room. Through the back-stairs banisters she peered and listened. Lady Naylor had given up calling, but could still be heard complaining to some one in the basement that she did not know where Lois was.

Marda had finished packing, but felt it would not be decent to reappear so soon. Especially when weather did not permit of the “last walk,” a formal parade of the grounds with her host and hostess before lunch-time. She was pleased to see Lois appear in the doorway.

“I brought up some cardboard in case you were packing photographs.”

“But I haven’t got any photographs.”

“And you’re packed ... Would you like me to sit on anything?”

“No, I think they will all shut.”

“What about Leslie?”

“Oh, he is in talc—unbreakable.”

“I say, I have never seen your engagement ring.”

“Oh yes, we must see the ring,” called Laurence, from over the landing. Surprised by a sudden stillness inside the whirlwind, he had been settling down to a half-morning’s work. But he came across and breathed on the ring with Lois, in an imitation of reverence, then returned to his work, shutting the door loudly. Lady Naylor was heard on the stairs again, talking to some one below as she came up. Lois uttered an exclamation of despair and dashed behind a window curtain. Lady Naylor came in with some cake in a cardboard box. She said she did not believe the train had a tea-car, but that Marda should be able to get a tea-basket at Ballybrophy. “But I am sure you won’t care for tea-basket cakes, we none of us do.”

“Thank you so much⁠—”

“My dear,” said her hostess, “it is really a terrible pity about your hand. Especially as it’s the left hand, as I’m afraid you will have to be conventional and start wearing your ring again, now you are going to England. It is extraordinary, Marda, the way things happen to you.”

“We must be thankful,” said Marda, “that nothing worse has happened this time.” Both thinking of Hugo, they looked at each other benevolently, brightly and blankly. “At least she has not thought of that,” they both thought.

Lady Naylor looked with surprise at Lois’s feet. “If you are hiding there,” she said, “it is simply silly. I have been calling you everywhere. Livvy is waiting for you down in the hall.”

“But I don’t want to see her.”

“But she is waiting for you in the hall.”

“I’ve got nothing to say and I’m sick of always having to keep on saying it.”

“I can’t help that, she is your friend. And I thought her feelings seemed very much hurt.”

“She will stay to lunch, you know,” Lois retorted.

“How fickle girls are!” said Lady Naylor, sitting down on the window-sill. Her manner of sitting and waiting most strongly encouraged an exit.

Lady Naylor was more than busy, but could not resist this last opportunity to discover, before the veil of an international marriage descended, what Marda really thought of the English. For nothing of Leslie was Irish except his aunts.

“Of course really,” she said, “you are very adaptable. I dare say we all are, but with some of us it does not have to come into play. I dare say you’ll be very happy indeed. Where did you think of living?”

Leslie had thought of London, Marda confessed an omission on her part.

“Of course that is hardly England,” said Lady Naylor, encouraging. “And of course it will be lovely for you being able to go abroad so easily; you will be so much nearer everything. And you will have no neighbours, one never has, I believe.”

“Demoralizing ...”

“You could certainly never be happy living like Anna Partridge. She has an unnaturally sweet disposition: I often pity her.... I always find the great thing in England is to have plenty to say, and mercifully they are determined to find one amusing. But if one stops talking, they tell one the most extraordinary things, about their husbands, their money affairs, their insides. They don’t seem discouraged by not being asked. And they seem so intimate with each other; I suppose it comes from living so close together. Of course they are very definite and practical, but it is a pity they talk so much about what they are doing. I can’t think why they think it should matter: supposing I came up here and insisted on telling you what I had been doing the whole morning!”

Marda, feeling how true this must be, pulled open an empty drawer and looked into it, much depressed.

“Though I don’t think it is fair,” pursued Lady Naylor, “to say they have no sense of humour, and of course they are anxious not to appear conventional, and they are kindness itself once they have ‘placed’ one.... Marda, surely you are not going to travel in that thin coat? Well, for heaven’s sake do not develop a cold till it can be obvious that you haven’t caught it here. How very unfortunate you have been in your weather! Just that one fine day at Castle Isabel and yesterday evening when you went for your walk. Before you came it was brilliant—such a pity you missed our last party—and as I was saying⁠— Why, Hugo ...”

He did not seem pleased to be with them. He was nonplussed at finding the door open, having prepared to tap on it inexpressively. Francie had insisted on sending him up with some eau-de-Cologne. She expected that Marda, being so modern, would not care for eau-de-Cologne, but wanted to give her some little token for the journey: this was all she could think of. To the idea of this present he offered surprising resistance. Or could she not take up her present herself? Her large eyes of protest reminded him—their plan of life must eliminate stairs for her; already, she had been up to the top once. So here he was, prepared to recede three steps when Marda should come to her door: he was of that school.

He stood back from the door, looking past with surprise at the room’s non-committal features—the chairs, the window—as though he were specially struck by there being a room at all in this part of the house, and especially this room. Some tree-tops fidgeted under his scrutiny. Where had he been all the morning, his hostess wanted to know; no one could find him. Indeed? They could not have looked far: for he had been in the dining-room, down at the dark end, taking out those old Illustrated London News, old bound volumes he remembered since he was a boy. There was that Tsar being bombed by Nihilists: very interesting.

“I can’t think how any of those Tsars had any confidence,” said Lady Naylor gloomily.

He looked doubtfully at the bottle of eau-de-Cologne; Lady Naylor asked at once what he had there, was told, and exclaimed at Francie’s imagination.

“There is nothing like eau-de-Cologne at the end of a crossing, when one is trying to look like something again. Of course, it may not be so bad to-night: at present I don’t like the look of those trees. Our inland weather does sometimes go by contraries; it may be surprisingly calm when one gets to Kingstown. I often wonder if living on an island does not make one more deeply religious—the French, for instance, could never have our sense of dependence—though of course they have railway accidents. But I shouldn’t think of it, Marda, that’s much the best way. I am sure one is often sea-sick from nervousness.”

“I don’t know what Miss Norton’s friends will think of her hand,” said Hugo. “Their worst suspicions will be confirmed; they will think we have been shooting at her. Her stumble was most unfortunate.”

“I ought to have brought back that piece of slate from the mill.”

“I hold you responsible, Hugo; you should not have let her go climbing about. Never mind, it will give them something to talk about.”

“You must draw on your imagination,” said Hugo to Marda. “Don’t let them suspect how tame we all are. They will expect you to be a bit of a heroine; you must tell them everything that might have happened.”

Marda, finding a place for the bottle of eau-de-Cologne at the top of her dressing-case, declared: “That would be inexhaustible.”

“They may think it odd that you should have cut the back of your hand....”

The three closed suitcases had a look of finality. Marda wished to go down and find Francie and thank her, they all three crossed the landing at a high pitch of affability. Laurence gripped the hair over his temples in larger handfuls and crouched lower down over his book. His thoughts, tight with concentration, were darkened by a wave of malignance. Marda’s door, which no one had shut, remained flapping and clicking.

In the yard, under the dripping chestnuts, Lois and Livvy walked about in their mackintoshes. This afternoon, Lois intended to wash the dogs; they might anticipate the occasion by disappearance, so she thought it better to go down now—they had had their dinners—and shut them up in the stables. They had gone up and looked for no reason into the loft, at the chaff and the dead swallows. They went back slowly, listening in vain for the gong.

“It seems odd,” said Livvy, “she should be going away; she seems to have only just come. I generally get so accustomed to your visitors. I have said good-bye to her once—I had no idea I should be staying to luncheon. However, I don’t suppose she will remember, she seemed rather flurried. Laurence was up there with her; it seems odd to me to have a man in one’s bedroom even in the morning, but I dare say she is rather cosmopolitan.... It does seem a pity, Lois, you forgot to ask her about that jumper pattern.”

“Do you remember those Black and Tans on the Clonmore road? They always remind me of her.”

“Why?” said Livvy. Then with her holy look, which Lois had up to now managed to keep in abeyance, she added: “That was a memorable day for me, naturally.”

“Why?” said Lois crossly.

“David and I decided to go to Cork.”

“I thought you said that was just chance.”

“It was predestination. Now I must tell you, Lois⁠—”

“Things that have come just before people seem like part of them.”

“How you do talk ...”

“No, I don’t.”

“Lois,” said Livvy sagaciously, “I hope things are not going wrong between you and Gerald?” Since her engagement, she spoke of all young men by their Christian names and made motherly little impulsive advances in all directions, like Mrs. Vermont.

Hugo wished to return to the Illustrated London News, but the parlourmaid was laying the table and looked at him in surprise. In the hall the two young girls, hair damp from their excursion, were playing left-hand catch with a tennis ball. So he had to go into the library where his wife and Marda were still talking about eau-de-Cologne—Marda against the mantelpiece, bright and hard-looking in her coat and skirt. Eau-de-Cologne wasn’t scent, Francie summed up; she hated scent for it seemed a kind of advertisement. Sir Richard joined them; they all four talked in an eager, unnatural way, as though they had just met for the first time.

Indeed, the unfamiliarity of the moment made them strange to themselves, though it now seemed to have been waiting ahead of them like a trap into which they had stepped with a degree of naturalness. Sir Richard, the least affected, thought the Montmorencys unduly animated and deplored departures. Visitors took form gradually in his household, coming out of a haze of rumour, and seemed but lightly, pleasantly superimposed on the vital pattern till a departure tore great shreds from the season’s texture. Francie rubbed the palms of her hands lightly on the tapestry of the chair-arms. She knew that life was unkind and that Marda must have begun at least to suspect this; she wondered how much Marda had understood from the eau-de-Cologne. Marda, turned half-away from them, tapped a tune on the edge of the mantelpiece, laughed at every shade of a silence and felt how resolutely Hugo did not look at her now. There was to be no opportunity for what he must not say to be father painfully not said. Hugo wished there had been a fire: the room was cold with rain and branches went restlessly up and down beyond the windows. Her face and figure, at which he dared not look, compelled his imagination with ghostly sharpness.

“You will have a very wet drive, I’m afraid,” said Sir Richard finally. To Francie, the remark had a faint echo. Had it been what she was going to say, or had she once said it?

Outside in the hall, Livvy skidded over the edge of a rug and came down heavily, knocking over a wicker chair. The tennis ball bounced away, Lois shrieked her condolences. They all made a movement of consternation and were delighted.

Livvy came into luncheon fragrant with Pond’s Extract, a shiny patch on her chin. She kept putting up a finger and feeling the bump: David must “kiss it better” for her to-morrow. David should have witnessed her courage: he seemed increasingly struck by her moral qualities; he had never observed these things in a girl before. Yesterday he had taken her over to tea at the Vermonts; at her suggestion, they had “told” the Vermonts, in confidence. It had been a success: she had been made to feel at once she belonged to the regiment. She had had no idea Mrs. Vermont was so jolly; she had taken Livvy off for a real little chat in her bedroom; they agreed what a rag it would be if the regiment went to China. Livvy looked voluptuously from Sir Richard to Lady Naylor, thinking what a surprise she had here for them both. She ate two helpings of fricasseed chicken, in absolute silence, designing her trousseau dressing-gown; and old Mr. Montmorency, who sat beside her, did not speak either.

“I like lunch at one,” said Lady Naylor, surprised. “It shortens the morning, but gives one so much more time in the afternoon. I can’t think why we don’t have it always.”

“I see no reason why we should not, my dear,” said Sir Richard, who, unlike an English husband, was not conservative in these matters.

The car came round twenty minutes too early, but Sir Richard said the chauffeur was quite right. He could hardly bear to let Marda drink her coffee and was but slightly mollified when she burnt herself. Mr. Montmorency sugared his coffee twice over, to Livvy’s delight. They drank coffee out in the hall, standing up; it was like the Passover. Marda went upstairs and came down in her travelling coat. Hugo stood at the foot of the stairs, in the back hall, tightening the screws of his racquet press.

“Good-bye,” she said. “Thank you for being nice to me.”

“Oh,” said he, looking blindly at her with his pale eyes, “have I been nice to you? Good!”

“Good-bye.”

“Good-bye—Marda.”

“Don’t come on to the steps⁠—”

“No, I’ll finish this press⁠—”

They both half-turned, heard the pendulum of the clock swing once: she went on into the hall. Everybody was there but Lois.

Lois stood behind the door in the drawing-room, waiting. “Marda,” she said through the crack. “Hullo?” said Marda. She came round the door, pushing it a little way to behind her. They kissed.

“Marda, I can’t⁠—”

“Never mind.”

“Darling!”

“Be good!”

“Happy journey!”

“Oh yes.” They parted.

Marda came back to the hall, not looking at anybody in particular, putting her gloves on. Lady Naylor asked her if she had packed the cake. Sir Richard patted her arm and said she was a good girl and must be sure and be happy—then looked very much abashed and startled at what he had done. Laurence looked bored, so bored; she was sorry for Laurence. She said: “I am really going.” “I’m sorry you’re going, I don’t think it’s⁠—” They shook hands, he immediately turned—rather rudely, his uncle thought, and walked into the library.

After all, there were only Sir Richard and Lady Naylor and Francie to wave Marda off from the steps and watch the car up the avenue into a veil of rain. Rather few, they felt, considering what a dear she had been and how they had come to love her. Wondering why and where the others had gone, they tried to present the broadest possible expanse of smile and flutter. And of this effort the flick of Marda’s gloved finger-tips round the hood conveyed the friendliest, the most satirical recognition.

“Well, that’s that,” said Livvy, at last discovering Lois in the drawing-room. “Partings make me ever so sad. Now listen, Lois⁠—”

“I’m afraid I’m not well, I’ve eaten something,” said Lois. “I’m sorry⁠—” She clapped her handkerchief to her mouth and fled from the drawing-room by the other door, stumbling over the portière. Livvy went a little way after her, talking, then came back: “It is a disadvantage to a girl,” she reflected, “that kind of stomach.”

Lois found in the empty spare room a piece of paper that crept on the floor like a living handkerchief. Through the defenceless windows came in the vacancy of the sky; the grey ceiling had gone up in remoteness. More wind came through, flowers moved in the vases, the pages of a book left open beside the bed turned over hurriedly. The pillow was dinted, as though half-way through packing Marda had lain down lazily. Or as though since last night the pillow had not forgotten the feel of her head.