‘Rather,’ said Mr Milton, coming forward with alacrity. ‘But won’t you be cold?’ Though he did not mind this at all he could not help noticing that she had less on than he could have imagined possible. She did not answer, only lashed her feather fan to and fro in a contemptuous gesture; so he said no more and followed her through the window.

The Hotel garden, though not large, had been so laid out with screens of trees and with circuitous paths as to afford visitors the maximum of variety and exercise. It had taken on this evening from the insistent music and from the light that splashed down on to the trees a character so unusual, so vivid yet unearthly, that James Milton could hardly recognize it for the place of gravel and thin foliage where some days ago he had been talking to Miss Fitzgerald on an iron chair. There was no moon, but the sky was pale with starshine. ‘I suppose,’ said Eileen Lawrence after a few moments, sniffing, ‘that this is what they’d call in books a balmy and languorous Southern night.’

‘It certainly smells good. Perhaps the lemon trees …’

‘A night made for love, that’s what they’d call it.’

‘I suppose they would … I say, are you certain you’re not cold?’

She shivered, but at this delightful thought. ‘A night when men go out with pistols and shoot themselves on the Casino terrace … Heavens, if this were Monte!’

‘But it certainly is the Riviera,’ said James Milton, and he thought of the whole band of white hotels like palaces along the line of coast into which their own seemed now to be knitted – hotels with light streaming out of them towards the tideless sea that, never advancing on the shore or receding from it, was like an inexorable unfailing Memory, not worked upon by thought or changed by sleep. ‘The Church Militant,’ he thought ridiculously; then stared back at a conviction which stared at him that there could be no closer oneness than in this community of desire however unworthy, of emotion however false, and that perhaps in just this consisted ——

– Eileen Lawrence brushed against him as they turned a corner.

‘What jolly arms you’ve got!’ he, feeling still immensely far from her, was moved to exclaim.