osted by someone of the party, and she could escape to her
window seat.

What would have happened if Carron had not come, she asked herself with
a shudder. Would her strength have come back, and would she have been
able to tell Joyselle that he must make no plans for her wedding?

Until she had known his father, Theo had never seemed to her to lack
personality; he was young, but his very boyishness was individual. Yet
now with Joyselle clamouring for her to fix her wedding-day, Theo seemed
to fade into insignificance, and her task to become that of breaking the
news of her intended rupture with the son, to the father.

And as she sat there in the background watching the members of the
little party as they smoked and chatted to each other, she gave up and
resolved on flight. "If I told Theo he would rush to his father," she
thought, "and then Joyselle would come to me. And we'd quarrel, and then
anything might happen." His utter unconsciousness was at once a
safeguard and a menace.

"I'll say nothing until he is safe in Normandy," she decided.

PART II

CHAPTER ONE

There is on an olive-covered slope near the Mediterranean a certain
shabby pink villa which is remarkable for one thing. In it, years ago,
dwelt for a long time a man and a woman who, having no legal right to
love, yet not only loved, but were perfectly happy. They lived almost
alone, they had little money, the house was shabby even then, they had
few servants and but indifferent Italian food, and nothing but
old-fashioned tin baths to wash in. Yet they were English, and they were
happy because they loved each other so much that nothing else mattered.
Now this phrase about nothing else mattering is as common in love
affairs as the pathetic abuse of the poor old word eternity; but in the
case I instance, it fitted. Nothing else did matter. Not even, to any
extent, the presence of the one child that had come to them. Contrary to
all ethical and reasonable law, these two sinners were happy in their
pink house by the sea, and years after they had left it there seemed to
hang about the old place a kind of atmosphere of romance, as if the sun
and the moon, that have seen so much changeableness, loved still to look
down at the place where two human beings had been faithful to each
other.

These two people were Pamela Lensky's father and mother, and hither
came, early in the November that followed her meeting with Victor
Joyselle, Lady Brigit