ON THE NIGHT of Ronald’s arrival a dance was taking place in the Hotel dining-room. Chairs and tables had been stacked away in a corner, the floor polished and the walls festooned with paper flags and specially illuminated. The music, audible in every part of the Hotel, though generally as a sustained thin humming with the pianist’s undertone as an irregular and tuneless pulse-beat, had drawn everybody; lounge and drawing-room had been drained of their usual occupants. Dances at the Hotel were not usual and this was in the nature of a gala-night. The concierge’s face was wreathed in smiles, but Ronald felt his manner lacked empressement. It was irritating, when one had inquired for one’s mother, to be told with an appearance of indifference that she, too, would be, doubtless, at the ball. He had been sustained till now by the brilliant certainty of being expected and awaited, but he was tired after his journey and the lounge, from which the palms had all been taken away to decorate the dining-room, now seemed repellent, mean and artificial.

‘Tell my mother I have come,’ he said to the concierge, and sat down in a wicker chair while the dance music throbbed at him. The concierge went away, but nobody came, though he waited; so at last he walked over to the dining-room door and, unable to see anything through the blind but twirling forms and wavering shadows, opened the door sharply and surveyed the scene from the threshold.

It must be admitted that the impressions he received were coloured for him by a prejudice against the Riviera which he had cultivated from his childhood and believed to be innate.

Veronica Lawrence was the first to remark and point out to her partner that a young man, probably Ronald Kerr, was standing in the doorway. She was wearing a tight green dress like a sheath, and every time she passed she looked thoughtfully at Ronald over her partner’s shoulder and once even smiled. Girls and young men had been asked in from the other hotels and the floor was crowded, while a close-packed row of onlookers sat or stood along the walls, pressing up so near to the band that the red-coated fiddlers began to look desperate, having scarcely elbow-room. The sexes were unequally represented, several couples of girls were dancing together. Some of the elder ladies had also taken the floor and were spinning round at a high velocity in the arms of their usual bridge-partners, whose coat-tails whirled horizontally, to the constant danger of more modern dancers whose poised totterings, hesitations and smooth forward rushes they perpetually interrupted.

‘He’s rather decorative,’ said Veronica. She had at last elicited a bow from Ronald, who felt convinced that the girl must know him.