Ronald could not understand why two people who had come to the place unaware of each other, in perfect integrity and without the intention of seeking a mate, should not be allowed to remain there untroubled now that a transitory notion of marrying one another had been abandoned. Or if they were due to depart, why had they to depart processionally in a long train of Spirits Pitiful; regrets, remorses, condolences, noisy emotions given the licence of carnival? Mrs Bellamy was ‘taking away’ Sydney (who now had to be bundled about like a lay figure and spoken of like the unillustrious dead) to a place on the French Riviera, and later to England. Milton was to move on to Florence, even to Assisi; there seemed a vagueness as to whether he might not be trusted in proper abandon to walk over the very edge of Italy into the sea. He had timed his departure, unwittingly, for the same date, the same train, as Ronald’s. Ronald, appalled by the thought of a journey in company with one for whom the web of a fatal attachment would be with every moment attenuating and snapping off strand by strand, had announced to his mother that travel with Milton he would not: it could not be done. He proposed to remain with her several days more.

‘We’d see each other on the platform,’ Ronald said; ‘we should be bound to see each other on the platform, and we should feel such asses looking all round each other and then getting into different carriages.’

‘Well, don’t get into different carriages; talk to each other.’

‘I really don’t know how to. You see, he would be bound to think I was embarrassed. I think he is the sort of man who would rather expect one to be.’