o
throw yellow reflections in the water. Standing there, it grew
perfectly dark--deeply and softly dark. The night had come down warm
and wet, like manifold blue-black gauze. She heard his quick, light
step. Her heart hammered, but she did not move. He came behind her,
clasped and held her close. "Oh, you've come--I wondered. Oh, how
sweet, how sweet--" And then "My love!" had been said, and she had
been kissed. In a moment he was gone. She had stayed on motionless,
enthralled by the beauty of the act--and when she had withdrawn
herself at last, and had tiptoed to the house, she saw his lamp on the
table, and himself reading the _Spectator_ before a wood fire!
Recalling all that, she remembered the happy little breath of laughter
which had caught her. "If it wasn't so perfectly sweet and beautiful,
it would be the most comic thing in the world!" she had said to
herself.

A telegram from Jimmy Urquhart came that night just before dinner.
"Arriving to-morrow say ten-thirty for an hour or so, Urquhart." It
was sent from St. James's Street. Lancelot had said, "Stout fellow,"
and James took it quite well. She herself remembered her feeling of
annoyance, how clearly she foresaw an interrupted reverie and a
hampered Sunday--and also how easily he had falsified her prevision.
There had been an animated morning of garden inspection, in the course
of which she had shown him (with a softly fluttering heart and perhaps
enhanced colour) the hedged oval of last night's romance; a pony race;
a game of single cricket in the paddock--Lancelot badly beaten; lunch,
and great debate with James about aeroplanes, wherein Lancelot showed
himself a bitter and unscrupulous adversary of his parent. Finally,
the trial of the new car: an engine of destruction such as Lancelot
had never dreamed of. It was admittedly too high-powered for England;
you were across the county in about a minute. And then he had departed
in a kind of thunderstorm of his own making. Lancelot, preternaturally
moved, said to his mother, "I say, Mamma, what a man--eh?" She,
lightly, "Yes, isn't he wonderful?" and Lancelot, with a snort: "A
man? Ten rather small men--easily." And James, poor James, saw nothing
kissable in that!

It hadn't been till May of that year that Lucy began to think about
Urquhart--or rather it was in May that she discovered herself to be
thinking about him. Mabel assisted her there. Mabel was in Cadogan
Square for the season, and the sisters saw mu