MISS FITZGERALD HURRIED OUT of the Hotel into the road. Here she stood still, looking purposelessly up and down in the blinding sunshine and picking at the fingers of her gloves. She was frightened by an interior quietness and by the thought that she had for once in her life stopped thinking and might never begin again. Ladies under discs of coloured shade from their parasols came walking down the middle of the road; they deflected their course to pass her. Their faces conveyed nothing, but now and then they would smile, and Miss Fitzgerald felt her throat and chin contract as custom wrenched from her a small, stiff bow. She stood there helplessly, as though she were waiting for a friend.

That Miss Fitzgerald should, after so violent an exit, simply continue to stand there had been beyond the calculations of Miss Pym. She, after a short blank pause of astonishment up in her room, had begun to creep down the stairs warily. She listened; she clung to the banisters – tense for retreat at every turn of the staircase. The lift-shaft rose direct from the lounge and the stairs bent round and round it: she stared down for a long time through the wire netting case of the shaft to assure herself that the lounge was empty. It was. There was not a soul down there; not a movement among the shadows, it was eleven o’clock and everybody would have gone out to the shops or the library, up to the hills or down to the tennis courts. Not a shadow crossed the veiled glass doors of the drawing-room to interrupt the glitter from the sea. Not a sound came up from the smoking-room. Miss Fitzgerald was not there.

Miss Pym had been quite sure she would not be there but all the same she let out a sigh of relief. Miss Fitzgerald had gone out: having discharged with such bitterness of finality that last shot in her locker she would have fled. At this crisis of ungovernable agitation Emily (how well they knew each other!) would have taken to the hills. Miss Pym could see plainly her figure stumbling up in the glare towards the shade of the olive trees, breast to breast with the increasing slope. She must be given a little longer to get away.