‘It’s a pity, of course,’ said Sydney, who could not help feeling it would have been more vigorous, more admirable on Milton’s part to have continued the walk with them. She believed herself able to recognize in what had occurred simply another of his nervous impulses; there had been, she was convinced, no impetus of emotion. In the unique encounter of eyes they had had, as with raised hat he was turning away from her, he had shown her nothing of what he felt but astonishment: a profound astonishment, at which of them she could not be sure. Those pale-grey eyes with their penetrating blankness were still vivid to her, but though she now intensely desired to reproach herself she could not wring from her memories any sense of his emotion. She came to doubt that she had witnessed anything more painful than the momentary topple of a shy but very potent vanity that had over-reached itself. A suspicion of having been casually snatched at hardened her towards him. He had not hurt her, but he had set the pain of the earlier morning free to renew itself; a nerve was insistently throbbing. She became aware with the knife-edge of a first realization, of each implication of the words, expression, gesture with which Mrs Kerr had detached herself and in smiling expectation gone past her downstairs.

In such a mood she was not proof against the ordinary reflections on mortality as she looked with Cordelia through the cemetery gates. To see better, they pressed their faces up against the cold bars. Cordelia for the last ten minutes had been hurrying, her whole self narrowed down; she had become silent with apprehension. She was tortured by an expectation that the cemetery with its ornaments might have rolled itself up and vanished, or worse, that it might fail in its pungent appeal, so that she would not this time experience what she had learned to describe as a frisson as she gazed through the gloom of the trees down that distracting prospective of monuments. Also, she had made herself responsible for the reactions of Miss Warren from the moment they turned down the suggestive cul-de-sac away from the sea, walled in steeply and vanishing at a succession of angles round the palm-tufted bases of the hills.