‘Ah,’ she cried, tearing one off, ‘why, I wonder, does one find it necessary to deceive others?’

Tearing up those petals of wrinkled, yet intoxicating kid, she could not have answered for the words she had to speak.

‘Do you,’ he asked, ‘find it necessary to deceive?’

‘One doesn’t know! One doesn’t know!’ she kept repeating. ‘It happens in spite of oneself.’

‘I can answer for myself,’ he assured her.

‘But can you?’ she asked, sitting very upright; he could see the shape of her piled-up hair.

‘Can you be aware,’ he heard, ‘of the effect you have on other people?’

Her voice had reached splintering point. Light from the rooms slashed through the darkness at the tiled terrace.

‘All those women in Paris clothes! The cigaretty women! Clawing at a handful of cards! Rapacious, bridge-playing women!’

She had stood to deal her coup de grâce.

‘That is one thing,’ she said. ‘But Aglaia. Even Aglaia.’

‘For God’s sake!’

‘Yes,’ she cried, and daring made her whirl, ‘Aglaia! You are so drunk with your success, you cannot resist, must court, inspire love even in a servant.’

The long, silky, timeless skirt whirled the darkness round in dancing out its hate. The voice of darkness choked with hate.

‘For God’s sake!’ he repeated. ‘What if Aglaia comes in and hears your lies?’

‘Oh, yes! Lies! Lies! Aglaia is the honest one. She is true. Yes. She is the rock that will never break unless God strikes her hard enough.’

Then Constantia, who had gone so far she could not return, took the glass from which she had been drinking, and pitched it at a corner of the terrace. The fragments hissed, and slithered bright across the tiles.

Afterwards, when he was raising her up, she believed she heard him say: ‘You will never kill what I feel for you, Constantia, however hard you try.’

She did so very much wish to believe, to hear tell of constancy. She longed to reach the plane on which he stood. Too far distant, finally.

‘I think, perhaps,’ she said, ‘I have killed. Myself. And that. Was the best way.’

But he raised her up, and held her, to pour into her hollow body something of his own strength.

Presently, with the little that remained of her, she took the surviving glass, and Aglaia came in, in her hat, and received the glass from the hands of her mistress, and rinsed it, and put it away.

Malliakas had lived so long in the garden-house at Cologny that the iron chair had eaten into his buttocks and hips, and signs of livery distress had appeared in patches round his eyes. Not that he regretted the time spent. In fact, he had allowed himself to be possessed to an extent that had never happened before.

He began to cough now, though, and look at his expensive Swiss watch.

‘She is late,’ said the old man, staring out across the sad lake. ‘It is her good heart. She allows them to make use of her.’