Then I added the loathsome words aloud.

“Hopefully in this encounter situation.”

Quite quickly sanity returned to me. They had been to the “quaint old house”. So this meeting was not accidental. They had wheedled my postes restantes out of Elizabeth, if not my agent. I was Rick’s special subject. I was his raw material, the ore in his mine, his farm, his lobster pots.

But where was he getting the money to come in pursuit? Such things are expensive, as I knew from an early attempt to get some letters back.

I thought of this girl, Mary Lou, with the transparent face of that beauty which must surely be holy and wise. Not like the poor old padre!

“Born again perhaps.”

The girl you meet every seven—no, every fourteen years, the one you meet, in fact, when it is all too late. I saw my sudden exhilaration for what it was, the symptom of my near-senility. I guessed how my breath must already stink of the morning’s Dôle. There might be much in this for Rick. There might be something in it for Mary Lou, opportunity to admire with distaste someone whose books she had read. But there could be nothing in it for me but fixation, frustration, folly and grief. I determined to sear this tiny bud of the future before it was in leaf. Let them chase someone else. There were authors enough to go round after all, authors by the thousand; and all with foreheads of such brass or lives of such impenetrable rectitude they could afford the deadliest of all poisons about themselves, the simple truth. Whereas I—

Seated on the green-painted bench I endured a shower of pics out of my past. I leapt up and hurried back to the hotel. I murmured to the manager that I was in need of solitude. Smoothly he recommended the Weisswald, an apron of skiing country held up to the sun and now deserted in the off-season. I should stay at the hotel Felsenblick. The others were clean, of course, but that was all. I nodded and nodded and paid my bill, packed, filled in my forwarding address as the Hotel Bung Ho, Hongkong, and stole away.

There was a vast garage at the foot of the Weisswald and then a rock railway slanting up the hideously vertical side of the mountain. I kept my eyes shut all the way up. My fear of heights is pathological, which is perhaps why I am fascinated by them. More than that, I wanted to save the view of the high places until I got on level ground and could admire them without feeling the compulsion to jump. A porter led me, my eyes watching my feet, to the hotel. The manager had a suite, no less, at a reduced price and its balcony overhung the cliff. He threw open the door and ushered me through.

“See!”

One side of the sitting-room was french windows, with the balcony outside them. Beyond that was five miles of empty air. The manager threw open the french windows and invited me to come outside. I stood close to the glass. The balcony felt firm enough.