He remained standing; she, propped reposefully among cushions, sat looking up at him. ‘Yes, you are charming,’ he doubtfully thought, ‘you injurious woman.’ He tried to look straight, as though dropping a plummet, into those profound brimming eyes, but the light from the ceiling invaded them; raw, hard-edged light, as though cut out of tinfoil, that touching them softened, swam down through them, melted, so that he could read nothing, looking down into luminousness. He had to surrender to her effect of mild brilliancy, of being serious, eager, friendly. ‘Yes, it’s true,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you know?’

After dinner, since Ronald’s arrival, she no longer went straight to her room, but would sit down with him on a sofa backed by a palm at the quieter end of the lounge. Here they looked, thought James Milton, approaching, like a fancy of Omar Khayyam’s, with a small tray of coffee beside them, a stack of serious periodicals (presumably Ronald’s), and a basket of crystallized fruit which Ronald advanced to their guests with a deprecating, vague liberality, as though he did not really care for this sort of thing himself. Their guest one did definitely constitute oneself, Milton felt, by coming over to them; her graceful delighted reception of one confirmed this, also the punctilious uprising of Ronald, who would continue to tower, prolonged by his shirt-front, indefinitely tall, crumpling gradually till asked to sit down again. Milton was not uninvited; he had insinuated himself down the lounge between eager conversationalists and touching chair-backs in response to a direct glance, a concentration upon himself of her general smile round as she looked at him.

Ronald pulled a chair forward at right angles; Milton sat down with them.

‘Then, of course,’ Mrs Kerr said, summing up, ‘you are happy.’

One is not, at such moments, expected to show oneself adequate; his smile and his gesture acknowledged becoming inadequacy. She nodded her womanly comprehension. ‘Quite,’ said she.

‘Excellent,’ said Ronald with an air of seniority to both of them. He recrossed his legs and bit into a crystallized tangerine.

‘I suppose,’ said Mrs Kerr thoughtfully, ‘I do perhaps understand a little of what this means to her.’

‘She told you, of course.’ Milton had presence of mind enough to make a startled gesture into a statement.

She nodded. ‘A little,’ she said. ‘You know – well, of course you know – she is a very quiet person. She didn’t say much, but she shone. She has the strangest possibilities of shining.’ Mrs Kerr seemed to have, as she spoke, a glimpse of Sydney from which he was excluded. ‘Of course,’ she added in the perfunctory quiet voice in which perfect taste demands the making of certain statements, ‘she is very happy … I have wanted so much for her and expected, really, so little that seeing her so, so lit-up, so certain, has meant a great deal to me. You’ve done – do you really understand? – a great deal.’