Oh, it was cruelly unjust, it was fiendish that she should have so many sorrows to bear. She seemed to have lost everything that she’d valued in the world. And yet she could still be so sweet and gentle, without any bitterness. And he, he’d have gladly been flayed alive if that could have lightened all this sorrow for her by one particle. He grieved over her in secret. He dared say nothing, not one kind word even, for fear that she should be troubled or embarrassed by his interest.

Ronald, with his Japanese warrior’s jaw, his ill-health, his etchings and books, could hardly remember that he had ever been attracted deeply by a woman. Except in a purely physical sense, and that was when he was quite a boy; tall, clumsy, ignorant, turned out into a barracks to make his way somehow, being a younger son. He had been a dreamer, then, from shyness. He had protected himself from all that dangerous, half-alluring, half-disgusting side of life by secreting around himself a shell of action, hardship, routine, friendships with brother officers who eventually married and asked him to be their best man. And from this shell of action he had preferred to watch women moving about on the edge of his world, like shapes in water, beautiful, mysterious, with waving tendrils and blossoms. But that was years and years ago.

Now he sat in the Club drinking Sanatogen and hot milk, thinking with pleasure that to-morrow the Society would meet for its weekly excursion.

*   *   *

They met, that afternoon, in the grounds of the house they had come to visit, an old mansion in the far western suburbs—the country residence of a family which was just about to relinquish it. In a few months the low white building with its Ionic portico, its Queen Anne windows, its long vista of shaven lawns between high elms which did not quite hide a steady stream of cars and buses along the distant road, would be sold, the house pulled down, the land used for building, for allotments, for playing-fields. The boards were already up at the drive gates, and the old caretaker who received them seemed bowed with the sense of impending disaster. The whole spirit of the meeting was tactful and hushed. Permission to view had been obtained as a special favour. There were three Lelys in the long gallery and a landscape by Cotman. They would be sold at Christie’s. Some wonderful Jacobean furniture. The family had been driven into hotels, on to chicken farms, away to the south of France. The caretaker was alone, waiting for the enemy.