He went for a walk up the hill at the back of the villas, along the precarious terraces from which the town looked small and the coast, in spite of its uniform blueness, disordered and desolate. Having stared for some time at all this, and at the unshadowed horizon with never a boat, without any sense of having been enlarged or inspirited, he came down again hurriedly by a steep direct way, slithering on the baked earth and sending stone after stone from beneath him bounding and crashing to what seemed the imminent peril of the colony below. In such a manner he descended to the tennis courts and, exceedingly loath to go in, stood staring through the wire netting and dusting the earth from his hands. To his relief and chagrin he could not see Sydney anywhere; his day bade fair to have simplified itself and he contemplated his future, over which an afternoon still to be filled up seemed to extend enormously, with a proper sense of reprieve but without appetite. One had to amuse oneself, but he did not see the necessity.

At a point in his reflections she must have come up behind him inaudibly, for her voice said abruptly, ‘Do you never play nowadays?’ He faced round guiltily and saw her, buttoned to the chin in a blazer stridently flame colour, with hands deep in the pockets, less like herself of the morning than a rather aggrieved little boy.

‘I never set you here when I do.’

‘I used to play once,’ said Sydney. ‘I could play – I can’t any more. Shall we walk somewhere?’ With an expression of being still, though with even greater indifference, at anybody’s disposal, she nodded backward indefinitely in the direction of the hills.

A silence, descending on them abruptly, protracted itself from minute to minute as he followed her up the path. She felt herself taut upright nervously, her racquet sticking out from under her arm. Her vivid blazer hurt his eyes in the glare, he had always to be looking away from her. She was not like the woman in the swinging white cloak with whom he had come this way in the advancing twilight on an evening when there had been some kind of a shock, when he had been startled – perhaps by a wild gash of light on some rocks. He recalled his own shiver, the shiver about him in the very dark trees; something must have been immanent. The path, their very contiguity seemed to be haunted; he wanted to catch up the girl ahead and put out a hand to her for comfort at this crisis of regret and nostalgia.

‘Where shall we go?’ he asked, and she cried without turning round, without, clearly, a thought for him: ‘Oh, anywhere; just down the road. Not far or I’ll die!’