at I might have a month then, don't you?" said Hillyard, and
Miss Cheyne opined that there would be no objection.

"But you will come back in a week," she stipulated, "won't you? The
Commodore will be here on Thursday, and there are things accumulating
which he must see to. So will you come on Friday?"

"Friday morning," Hillyard suggested.

Thursday was the day on which he should have travelled down to Rackham
Park, but if he could finish his business on Friday morning, he would
only lose one day.

"Friday morning then," said Miss Cheyne, and made a note of it.

Hillyard had thus a week in which to resume his friendships, arrange to
write, at some distant time, a play, revisit his club and his tailor,
and revel, as at a pageant, in the fresh beauty, the summer clothes, the
white skin and clean-limbed boyishness of English girls. He went
through, in a word, the first experiences of most men returned from a
long sojourn in other climes; and they were ordinary enough. But the
week was made notable for him by one small incident.

It was on the Monday and about five o'clock in the afternoon. He was
walking from the Charing Cross Road towards Leicester Square, when, from
a doorway ahead of him, a couple emerged. They did not turn his way but
preceded him, so that he only saw their backs. But he had no doubt who
one of the couple was. The fair hair, the tall, slim, long-limbed
figure, the perverse sloppiness of dress which could not quite obscure
her grace of youth, betrayed the disdainful prodigy of Rackham Park. The
creator of Linda Spavinsky swam ahead of him. Had he doubted her
identity, a glance at the door from which she had emerged would have
dispelled the doubt. It was the entrance to a picture gallery, where,
cubes and curves having served their turn and gone, the rotundists were
having an innings. Everybody and everything was in rounds, palaces and
gardens and ships and Westminster Bridge, and men and women were all in
circles. The circle was the principle of life and art. Joan Whitworth
would be drawn to the exhibition as a filing to a magnet. Undoubtedly
Joan Whitworth was ahead of Hillyard and he began to hurry after her.
But he checked himself after a few paces. Or rather the aspect of her
companion checked him. His appearance was vaguely familiar, but that was
all. It was not certainly Sir Chichester Splay, for the all-sufficient
reason that the Private View had long gone by; since the very last week
of t