Later, as they turned in at the Hotel gate, she had an idea. ‘I say, you do marry people, don’t you – I mean, professionally? It would be rather a joke if you were to marry us. Rather a grim joke, I dare say,’ she added with bent brows, tightening her racquet-press. But that evening, as with a feverish sense of exclusion from everywhere he walked up and down on the gravel, she melted ahead of him into the darkness, trailing the wraith of a shawl from her shoulders, going down to the sea with her Victor to look at the moonlight. She came into the lounge again, shining-eyed, mysterious from having been kissed, and Milton felt that at least she was not unhappy.

He was haunted by Ronald. Ronald, whenever they met, paused momentarily, opened and shut his mouth, seemed always just on the verge of an utterance which was to clarify everything and banish confusion. An oblique glance, penetrating, but addressed to one another’s features rather than eye to eye, would pass between them. Then smiling regretfully, as though he had been urgently called away, Ronald would shake back the piece of hair from his forehead and dart off. Milton had the feeling each time of having been weighed and found wanting. There must have been something about him that brought Ronald up dead. He told himself this did not matter, he would not see Ronald again: then the thought of not seeing Ronald again would itself inexpressibly sadden him. The thought of Ronald and Sydney going away in different directions, and of the unlikelihood of their ever meeting came to be even more painful; the injury was personal, as though one or the other, or both of them, had been part of himself. Every time he met Ronald there was the embarrassment, not just of that one moment of failure sharp as the slam of a door, but of a dozen remembered others mounting up behind it.

‘I will speak,’ Milton said to himself at last, and Ronald must have come to the same decision, for the next time they met they both began to talk at once, irrelevantly and loudly. It was this, chiefly, which had made Ronald so unwilling that they should travel together to Genoa. Walking about the room, he was trying with great difficulty to explain this to his mother.

Mrs Kerr, still with an eye on her letters but with attention dutifully withdrawn from her own affairs, raised herself among the cushions and turned a little round on the sofa to consider her son’s difficulty.

‘I don’t want to sacrifice you, my darling,’ she said, ‘but if you would do this you would really oblige me. You see, Ronald, the poor man does like you. I thought if you would try and be nice to him – make it all easier – just for an hour or two in the train.’

‘It’s an Italian train,’ said Ronald gloomily.