‘You’re going to marry that child. You love her.’

‘Do I?’ he said. ‘I thought I did.’

‘I won’t be a party to deceiving her, Peter. You must understand that. If you won’t promise to tell her, I can’t see you again.’

Perhaps when he saw Lisa . . . He went across the park to her mother’s house on the Sunday evening. The medium was there and another woman who looked like a participant in a Black Mass, earnestly listening to Mrs Cleasant’s account of the mystic and his investigations into the mysteries of the Great Pyramid. Lisa rushed into his arms, actually crying with happiness.

‘This child has dreamed about you every night, Peter,’ said Mrs Cleasant with one of her weird faraway looks. ‘Such dreams she has had! Of course she’s psychic like me. When we knew the posts were delayed I wanted her to get a message through to you by the Power of Thought, but she was unwilling.’

‘I knew you wouldn’t like it,’ said Lisa. She sat on his knee, in his arms. Of course he couldn’t tell her. In time, maybe, if he got their wedding postponed and cooled things and . . . But it was out of the question to tell her now.

He told Zoe he had. In order to see her again, he had to do that.

‘How did she take it?’

‘Oh, quite well,’ he lied. ‘A lot of men have been paying her attention on holiday. I think she’s just beginning to realize I’m not the only man in the world.’

‘And she accepts – us?’

Why did she have to persist, why make it so painful for him? He spoke boldly but with an inner self-disgust.

‘I daresay she sees it as a let-out for her own freedom.’

She was convinced. The habitual truth-teller is reluctant to detect falsehood in others. ‘Of course I’ve only met her once, and then only for a few minutes. But I wonder if you weren’t deceiving yourself, Peter, when you said she loved you so much. You aren’t going to see her again?’

He said he wasn’t. He said it was all over, they had parted. But the enormity of what he had done appalled him. And when next he was with Lisa he found himself telling her all over again, and meaning it, how much he loved her and longed to take her away. Was he going to sacrifice that childish passionate love for a woman five years older than himself? They were, in many ways, so alike. Suppose, in time to come, he grew tired of the one and regretted the other? Yet, that night, he went back to Zoe.

With a skilful but frightening intrigue, he divided his time between the one and the other. It wasn’t too difficult. Social – and occult – demands were always being made on Lisa. Zoe believed him when he said he had been kept late at work. Autumn came, and it was still going on, this double life. His need for, his dependence on, Zoe intensified and he had begun to resent every moment he spent away from her. But Lisa and her mother had fixed his wedding date and with fatality he accepted its inexorable approach.