She went over to kneel on the window seat looking out at the river.

‘This cushion’s damp. I bet it’s been used in the punt.’

‘The young are so critical,’ said Minnie without rancour. ‘I think we could open one bottle of champagne, Rogers, before they come. Lady Hartlip looks cold. Come by the fire, my dear, and have a little glass of champagne to warm you up.’

‘They’re coming,’ said Cicely from the window. ‘I can see Glass with Sambo and the game cart. I shall go and kiss his darling old nose.’

‘Cicely, Cicely,’ her grandmother remonstrated.

‘She means Sambo’s nose,’ explained Ida without smiling.

‘Even so …’

★

Lionel felt quite strange, walking along the path through the trees, turning in through the open gate towards the entangled rustic columns and the wooden balcony and the painted gable, an enchantress’s dwelling certainly, so deep in the woods and close to the quiet-flowing river. As soon as he had seen the building he had felt this strangeness, faintness almost. All morning he had been concentrating on the familiar and satisfying routine of shooting, a routine in which the alternate demands of technique and good manners meant that one had little time left over for dreaming; the sight of the boat-house brought the dream immediately to the forefront of his mind. She would be there already.

Lionel had known Bob Lilburn slightly for many years, but had not met Olivia until Maisie Arlington had happened to ask them all to the same dinner party only a few months ago before a ball at the Russian Embassy. He had thought her beautiful and good, clever and kind, but it seemed to him that there were many married women of his acquaintance to whom those four adjectives could aptly be applied. The mystery was as to how the foolish creatures in their first or second season next to whom he often found himself sitting at dinner could turn apparently overnight into such exquisitely civilized beauties. Of course, they were quite endearing, the girls, with their touching determination to keep talking at all costs and their tendency when one saw them at home in the country to relapse into their former ways as the tomboys of the schoolroom, only pulling themselves up short from time to time when they remembered they were young ladies now with their hair up and a duty to keep younger brothers and sisters, governesses, ponies and dogs at an appropriate distance, but he found them insufficiently serious and was afraid that as a result they thought him a prig. But a wife, he thought, who was to be one’s life’s companion, had to be someone to look up to. He felt in himself a capacity for adoration which loosed on one of these insubstantial creatures might be expected to frighten her to death. How could he lay upon one of these children the responsibility of personifying the Ideal? So he went home to Lincolnshire and his mother, whose acid tongue did not prevent him from seeing her as having always held out for him the supremacy of beauty and honour, this being it seemed to him a considerable part of what women were for. At a slightly different level he took actresses out to dinner. He gained thereby a reputation (to which he was indifferent) as a man about town, but most of them were respectable girls and when they were not he usually felt rather a beast afterwards. That the beastliness and the capacity for worship might one day unite and both be bent upon one chosen object had begun to seem less and less likely. His third meeting with Olivia had achieved it.