The word spread somehow, and when the child’s eyes again dropped open, then lazily shut, several people were alert to notice that the eyes were china-white. The minstrel, appreciative of the interest thus created, pulled his companion forward and stopped in his song to advertise her with a flourish. ‘Cieca, cieca!’ he exclaimed, and straddled shining up at them, all teeth. The little girl, in the ecstasy of this, flung her arms out and began to dance again, whirling at such velocity that it was as though she tore the music from the mandolin to follow her. Ripples of ‘Shame’ and ‘Cruel’ crept down the balcony, but from the windows above the first drops of a shower of nickel were spinning already. The shower thickened, and there was for a moment or two in the air a continous glitter. The little girl paused leaning against the wind of her movement and seemed to listen in ecstasy. She snatched up handfuls of air and surrendered them laughingly, then flung herself with cries of delight to and fro on the gravel and, groping, gathered up her harvest. There followed some heavier coins, the escape of a sigh and a faint burst of horrified laughter.

‘But she is happy,’ maintained Sydney, standing back against the frame of the window, and a voice she could not trace but believed to be Milton’s supported her with ‘Yes, yes, she must be.’

Ronald wriggled beneath the weight of the two good women, but could not extricate himself in time to see who, on either occasion, had spoken. He would have given much to do so. All today there had been phrases, broken-off, exclamatory, rising stark like this out of a hush or a hum with a significance for him foreign to their context, with startling relevance to something in his mind.

He pushed his way back into the drawing-room, now quite vacant and in yellow shade from the awning. He sat down on a sofa, leaned back, crossing his legs, and waited for his mother to appear in the window, as she almost immediately did, and after a moment’s blank stare into the dusk to perceive him and come over royally. She did concede, and generously he could approve the concession, a few words back over her shouder, perhaps to Miss Warren out there. Then she sat beside him, most beautiful in the half-light, her attitude settling into complete repose as silk settles into its folds. She had still a little amusement, a faint perturbation, but she was allowing these ripples to widen and fade in her mind. It would be clear of them soon, a smooth consciousness on to which he hoped to stream like light.