Ronald came running down the steps in too much of a hurry to look at anybody. He flung his overcoats and another dispatch-case into the shandrydan, then went round to the box and gravely tested the roping-on of the luggage. The pile wobbled so menacingly that he was discouraged, left it alone and ran in again. During another interval he must have kissed and said goodbye to his mother, perhaps in her room, perhaps on the stairs. When they appeared in the doorway all that was visibly over between them. She still had a hand on his sleeve, but it was a light and casual contact of which neither of them seemed aware: she had already delivered him up to futurity. Those who had felt constrained to draw back from the scene of a parting began to return again. Ronald became their prey. Appalled by a publicity as of the scaffold he turned with some desperately trumped-up remark to his mother, but she was not behind him. Apart, at the top of the steps, bareheaded in the afternoon light she was standing, a little fatigued by all this, looking across at the hill that rose over the road and the group of young palms at the gate that seemed to be also serenely awaiting the exit.

‘I say, if Milton doesn’t come soon we shall run it fine,’ called Ronald in an unnatural, loud voice. Another woman would have jumped at this excuse to hurry back into the Hotel agitatedly calling, anything rather than stand there, just stand there. But Mrs Kerr stood there, and women’s hearts hardened. ‘Oh no, Ronald,’ she said, ‘you have plenty of time.’

Ronald braced up, with his back to the shandrydan, frowned up the steps to search out the interior gloom. A moment, his face lightened: Milton must be coming. Milton was coming, he was half-way down the steps with his hat off, bowing and smiling to left and right, and Ronald was half-way into the shandrydan. Then a voice – Mrs Bellamy’s – called ‘Mr Milton!’ and Milton turned back. It was strange almost eerie, to hear Mrs Bellamy’s voice, because she and Sydney had managed somehow to create an impression of having already departed. Since lunch-time when they had said their goodbyes they must have been up in their rooms. It was recalled with a shock that they were not to set out on their shorter journey up the coast till just before tea-time. Yet Tessa had been already translated, she was an amiable ghost, and her cousin a hard-sounding name with a cold-sounding echo. It was as though Milton running back up the steps with his same formal smile were going back into the shades.