‘But you must. You shall. Now it’s time to go to bed, though I could wander about for ever. We must be up early in order to get to the house agents’ as soon as it’s open. Woggles & Pickstick, isn’t it?’

‘Now you’ve confused me,’ said Georgie. ‘Rather like it, but not quite.’

They went upstairs to bed: their rooms were next each other, with a communicating door. There was a bolt on Georgie’s side of it, and he went swiftly across to this and fastened it. Even as he did so, he heard a key quietly turned from the other side of it. He undressed with the stealth of a burglar prowling about a house, for somehow it was shy work that he and Lucia should be going to bed so close to each other; he brushed his teeth with infinite precaution and bent low over the basin to eject (spitting would be too noisy a word) the water with which he had rinsed his mouth, for it would never do to let a sound of these intimate manoeuvres penetrate next door. When half-undressed he remembered that the house agents’ name was Woolgar & Pipstow, and he longed to tap at Lucia’s door and proclaim it, but the silence of the grave reigned next door, and perhaps Lucia was asleep already. Or was she, too, being as stealthy as he? Whichever it was (particularly if it was the last) he must not let a betrayal of his presence reach her.

He got into bed and clicked out his light. That could be done quite boldly: she might hear that, for it only betokened that all was over. Then, in spite of this long day in the open air, which should have conduced to drowsiness, he felt terribly wide awake, for the subject which had intermittently occupied his mind, shadowing it with dim apprehension, ever since Pepino’s death, presented itself in the most garish colours. For years, by a pretty Riseholme fantasy, it had always been supposed that he was the implacably Platonic but devout lover of Lucia: somehow that interesting fiction had grown up, and Lucia had certainly abetted it as well as himself. She had let it be supposed that he was, and that she accepted this chaste fervour. But now that her year of widowhood was nearly over, there loomed in front of Georgie the awful fact that very soon there could be no earthly reason why he should not claim his reward for these years of devotion and exchange his passionate celibacy for an even more passionate matrimony. It was an unnerving thought that he might have the right before the summer was over, to tap at some door of communication like that which he had so carefully bolted (and she locked) and say, ‘May I come in, darling?’ He felt that the words would freeze on his tongue before he could utter them.