‘So did I,’ said James Milton, and following her back to the ballroom he tried in vain to decide whether she and the mood to which she had given colour had been base or very admirable. He gave her up to her next partner and returned to the fireplace, but the dance became meaningless; he could not see Sydney anywhere. Once he thought she appeared beyond the window, half in the darkness, but she was shut away from him by the spinning barrier. He determined to find her, to allay the restlessness which was beginning to sap his benignity and make him look with contempt at the older people and at the young with resentment. If he did not find her soon he would begin to believe that there was not a place in the world for him – he started at a flash of red in one of the mirrors, but it was only the sweep of Eileen’s crimson fan. He felt that he could no longer endure the ballroom, and that even if by leaving it he were to cut himself off for ever from all it contained, he must leave it to look for her.

He went out into the lounge with his heart in his mouth, but there was no one there but Mr Lee-Mittison, walking about and rubbing his hands, so happy that he had to expand here in solitude.

‘Charming boy, that,’ said Mr Lee-Mittison. ‘Really an acquisition – charming boy.’

‘Indeed?’ said Milton, who had forgotten Ronald.

‘Found his mother for him. Nice woman, very nice woman. Pretty to see ’em together.’ He beamed at Milton as he had not beamed for days.

‘Was it?’ said Milton. He stared again round the emptiness of the lounge, went to the foot of the stairs and looked up, listened and with a last desperate inspiration looked into the drawing-room.

‘Looking for anybody?’ asked Mr Lee-Mittison, observing this.

‘No,’ said Milton, and nodding good night to Mr Lee-Mittison he went down the basement stairs into the smoking-room and out by a glass door into the garden again. Here he walked to and fro, repelled by the darkness, peering angrily into the arbours which were now all empty and silent and quickening his steps at every turn of a path. He looked at the great sheer façade springing upright above him with here and there a light coming out in a window, and thought, ‘Of course, she is tired; she has gone up to bed.’

‘But she was not tired at all: she did not look as though she would ever sleep again,’ his memory told him.

‘I suppose I must love her? – But I cannot, she is so erratic and cold –’

‘It is because she’s erratic and cold that you’ve been able to surprise your emotion.’

‘Oh, rats!’ said James Milton, kicking a stone. A figure that had come out on to one of the balconies started and peered down into the garden.