The shades came to meet him not far inside the door. Tessa was breathless. ‘ – We’re so worried,’ she said, ‘couldn’t find you this morning.’ She shook his hand between both of hers with more little broken-off sentences. ‘Do so hope … did so wish … shall remember …’

Sydney, looking unnatural and urban in a dark-coloured travelling-dress, stepped out from behind her. ‘Well, goodbye,’ she said, and she and Milton shook hands awkwardly.

‘Well, goodbye,’ said he, and after a moment’s hesitation as though he did not like to seem too abrupt ran down the steps and got into the shandrydan. She came a little way after him and stood with a hand on the concierge’s desk, from which she picked up an envelope and confusedly read the address, then looked after him again. Her manner was strained and unwomanly: the impulse that had brought her down here (it could not have been Tessa’s) had been highly unnatural. She did not wait to watch the departure but turned and went upstairs again slowly, followed by Tessa.

Milton and Ronald looked up at the windows of the Hotel vacantly; everybody looked at each other, everybody waited. At last the driver climbed on to the box, at last he gathered up the reins. Milton and Ronald sitting stiffly side by side – their legs, willy-nilly entwined in the limited scope of the shandrydan, entangled in rugs and overcoats – relaxed, were bumped violently forward as the carriage moved on, let broad smiles break over their faces. Their friends who had been drawing deep breaths for this moment released an enormous ‘Good-by-ye!’ A hundred jocularities that there had not yet been mood or occasion for were launched off bravely after the never-returning couple. One could tell them anything now, before it was too late, their memories were from henceforward a limbo. The voices went up to the sky, together or isolated. Ronald’s mother stood smiling and waving her hand; all round her the handkerchiefs fluttered … ‘Dear old Ronald … Steady, Ronald … Sure you know where you’re going, Ronald? …’ and at the height of all this, ‘Cheer up, Milton!’

Someone flung a bunch of flowers at Ronald and it struck Milton on the side of the head and dropped just under the wheel; the stalks were crushed and a slimy smear appeared on the wheel and came round faster and faster and faster as the driver took the gravel sweep magnificently and turned off out of the gate. Cordelia Barry rushed out, picked up the flowers and flung them again, but this time they fell quite short, and everybody laughed.

Milton and Ronald, avoiding one another’s eye, leant over the back of the carriage waving their hats and shouting jocular nothings. The driver cracked his whip, the rattling wheels fled faster and soon the travellers, still waving and with big mouths open inaudibly, had disappeared. The little company on the steps sighed in immense desolation.