As Ronald walked slowly up the drive, the moist gravel shrinking crisply under his feet, the air of the avenue, bare as it was of leaves, clammy—it must always be clammy in that low-lying spot—he was filled with the oppressive yet faintly pleasing reverent sadness which he so often experienced on these occasions. Mrs. Vernon was standing on the steps of the house. She smiled.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” she said.

It was not the first time that this had happened. It was, to him, one of the most charming intimacies of their friendship that she liked to see everything at the same moment as himself, comparing impressions and scraps of knowledge with him.

She wore grey to-day, not black. And this seemed exactly to suit the mood of the sad, cloudy afternoon and the abandoned rooms of the mansion, where chandeliers hung from moulded ceilings, draped in holland bags. Their visit was somehow like a religious ceremony, and their eyes met with the expression of people who regard each other for a moment in church. The caretaker’s voice echoed dully down the corridors. Ronald and Mrs. Vernon addressed each other occasionally, in low voices, remarking on a piece of china or the back of a chair.

At length, when they stood looking out over the lawn from a window on the second storey, she said:

“I can’t bear to think of all this passing away.”

There was real emotion in her voice. It moved Ronald deeply.

“People want to destroy all this,” she said. “But what have they got to put in its place?”

The courage of her reactionary romanticism moved him. He was a reactionary himself, perhaps, but, reading the newspapers, he had felt a confused enthusiasm also for housing schemes, playing-fields, London as a garden city. He belonged to both camps. She did not. He honoured her for it. Standing at the window, in the waning afternoon, with her slight figure, her low voice, she seemed to be crying out against that distant stream of scarlet buses and dark closed cars sweeping by the gates. She challenged the future with an extraordinary passion of quiet resentment. There were tears in her eyes.

“They’ve got nothing,” she said.

He mumbled some words of agreement.

Mrs. Vernon seemed pleased at his support. She smiled sadly and yet gaily.

“At any rate, they’ve got no use for us.”

Chapter III

III