Tired, walking more slowly, he stopped at last before a door which seemed familiar. It was his Club. The few fellow-members who nodded to him, as he passed through the smoking-room and sat down in his favourite chair, remarked that Charlesworth was actually a quarter of an hour late. Usually, you could set your watch by him—any of his three dining nights in the week.

Chapter III

III

“AND so I’m taking myself off,” Edward wrote, trying to steady his hand against the vibration of the little table. “I rely on you to make the peace with Mary. For God’s sake, invent some extraordinarily subtle reason for my departure, and be sure to write and tell me exactly what it is. Then I can send her a Christmas card. The truth is merely that I had a sudden dazzling vision of what it will be like at the Gowers’ and at the Kleins’, and on New Year’s Eve at Mrs. Gidden’s. And it was too much for me. Please forgive this, certainly not my last, betrayal.”

They were well beyond Hannover; had finished lunch. The sad level plains, unfenced, dotted with woods, rotated smoothly beyond the thick pane curtained with green baize to prevent the least draught. The dining-car smelt richly of the cigars of stout shaven-skulled passengers with student scars on their cheeks. Edward’s light impertinent eye surveyed them, his fingers drumming the stem of his glass.

Raising it, he sipped; sucked his pencil, added:

“I shall be back early in the New Year.”

*   *   *

He lay in the deck chair under the tattered eucalyptus tree. The leaves stirred in a faint breeze puffing over the headland. Looking sleepily down the slopes of the terraced hill writhing with black vine-roots, upon the orange and pink houses clustered round the belfry tower. Every pebble of the gritty hillside showed hard and clear in the intense light. But across the dark blue gulf the low, grey, secret-looking destroyers were almost invisible against the opposite shore. Far beyond, high above the terrestrial horizon, snow-facets of Alpine precipices were printed, like a half-developed photograph, on the dazzling air.

Margaret was standing behind him. She had just come down from the house.

She smiled. Her teeth showed bone-white against the darkness of her sunburnt skin. She was radiant. Her eyes shone.

“Food’s ready.”

“What is there?” asked Edward, with a big yawn.

“Omelette, fruit, salad—I’ve tried it the new way Thérèse showed us.”

“Splendid.”

He rose wearily, weary of sitting still. He’d eaten enough for months. He ate with her eyes upon him, forcing down the mouthfuls. She asked anxiously:

“Isn’t it good?”

“It’s first-class.”

“No, but tell me, the flavouring isn’t quite the same—is it?”

He roused himself to consider.

“I believe it needs a little more of that stuff that looks like parsley and isn’t—what’s it called?”

“Yes. You’re right. It does.”