Alice leaned her arms across Mrs. Shenstone’s lap and hid her face from them both. Alice was thinking in a dazed, foolish way that there was a smear of lipstick still on George’s chin—and remembering how Hilary used to pass a white handkerchief across his smiling mouth when they had sat out a dance in the garden, or—and how once she had said to him indignantly, “My lipstick doesn’t come off on people!” and he had shown her his handkerchief, faintly smudged with pink, and laughed. And now she saw clearly all at once that Hilary had forgotten more about women than George would ever know—George, who boasted of his omniscience and was clumsy with his kissing. If ever once she had let herself go with Hilary as she had done today with George, instead of raising up a maidenly reserve between them in order to bait him into pressing for more — instead of hurling her virginity in his face in an effort to jockey him into marrying her — Hilary’s thin brown hands — Hilary’s lips, firm and sweet, but knowing, in their infrequent kisses — Hilary — gone forever....

“It was a shock,” his mother was saying apologetically. “I—I never meant to break down like that, I—” Her eyes were fixed on George’s stupefied face. “What is it, George? Why do you look so—queer? George, what are you thinking?”

“Nothing,” he said, looking very queer indeed. “Nothing, only—it was Hilary’s room old Ponsonby had last night at the club.”

CHAPTER NINE

HILARY found himself again in the sunny street, drifting aimlessly. So Alice would marry George and be happy—happier than his mother had been. He realized, now that she had brought it home to him, that it was no life he would have offered a wife. But he had promised himself to settle down one day, perhaps at Nuns Farthing. He had never meant to die in his tracks like that, on the wrong side of the Frontier. If Alice had played her cards right, he might never have gone back to India....