Many people who admired Mrs Kerr had already congratulated her; others who had still to do so sought her out as they streamed from the dining-room. A small crowd gathered about her as she stood in the doorway, like a tall bride, confused and elated. Many who did not like her at all had also congratulated, as they were anxious to see how she was taking it. ‘Splendid!’ shouted and smiled Mr Milton over the intervening heads; his long, rather pink face also towering.

‘Yes, it’s splendid, isn’t it?’ agreed Sydney from behind him. She was jostled against him all at once by more people pushing out from the dining-room and he said, putting out a hand to steady her: ‘I’m sure you must be glad?’

At the end of that afternoon’s tennis he waited for Sydney and walked up with her from the club. ‘This young man, this Ronald,’ he asked, ‘do you know him?’

‘I feel I do,’ said Sydney. ‘Mrs Kerr has shown me his letters, and she laughs at me occasionally and says I am like him. And there is a photograph, anyway, that one couldn’t help noticing. Altogether I feel he is to be a kind of comic character.’

‘Oh! Does his mother think he is funny?’ said James Milton, slightly jarred.

‘But young people are always funny: as we get more sophisticated we can’t help realizing that ourselves – I don’t know whether that makes us less funny or more so.’

The sun had dipped to the line of the hills, so that the sky had a kind of gold sparkle which reflected itself on figures and faces. Even before the moment of sunset the air was already tingling with cold; the dark, keen, upstanding trees about them seemed slightly to shiver. Sydney flung the folds of her white fleecy cloak across her breast, and holding them gathered against her paused a moment, looking back towards the tennis-courts with a wild, Beatrice Cenci expression which did not correspond with her thoughts, and of which she was wholly unconscious. Milton’s heart leapt to his mouth for that moment; then he felt the chill of dusk lay an ice-cold hand on him, and he shuddered. He asked her impatiently if she were waiting for anyone else.

She said ‘No’ in surprise, and walked beside him up the path to the Hotel, treading noiselessly in her rope-soled shoes. ‘It is an alarming idea,’ said he, unable to maintain a silence of whose peculiar quality he became intolerably conscious, ‘that the young should be getting progressively more and more sophisticated. It is as bad as it is to be told, if one is a reader of adventure stories, that no part of dark Africa remains undiscovered, and that one-inch maps of all parts of the world will be available shortly.’

‘I suppose it would be if one ever seriously considered youth were romantic.’