Their meetings, since the night of his conversation with Mrs Kerr, had been of the type disturbed and momentary, whose sum total is an effect of separation. Was he apprehensive of meeting her again in this bare narrow place, the stage for a crisis, where no side-issue could offer itself to be grasped at, and there would be nowhere to escape from Mrs Kerr and all she had said? Since their talk in the lounge Mrs Kerr had been with him unceasingly; his thoughts even in sleep were full of anguished reasonings with her. He did not cease to bitter crying, ‘No, no, no!’ against the shut doors of her eloquent reserve. The more clearly he remembered how little Sydney’s infinitely loyal friend had actually said the more did he despair of Sydney’s lover for having understood so much. The thought of Sydney waiting for him now (if she had not been impatient and gone away) in all good faith at the top of the valley, of the all-assuming confidence she had in him, which seemed the curiously simple and yet perfect flowering of her strange nature, like flowers springing out on a bare almond tree, destroyed his confidence in himself.

Next week Milton would go back to England. He had written this to his brother, taking some pleasure in committing himself definitely to the arrangement, but the fate of the good resolution lay with the unposted letters, still in his own control. He would go back, and she a little later would follow him; or she might even prefer to come back with him now. Could she wish to stay longer? Her tie with the Hotel that still exerted, he was aware, an agonizing restraint, had better be broken off summarily at the cost he could not tell of how much damage to her integrity – without help from him, without a word from him that her confidence did not invite. They had mentioned Mrs Kerr frequently, but there had never been more than a little head of her stamped as it were for circulation on a conversational coin. They had not yet talked of her, she had not in person entered their field.