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undraped stare. Uneasily light by day, at night slow to darken, the room seemed to be waiting, perhaps for ever, for its dismantlement to be complete. Shreds of butterflies clung to the cornice, out of reach of the mop.
    Yet the tide might turn. To the marble chimneypiece Jane on one of her visits, had restored a pair of fluted pink cornucopias, into which she sometimes remembered to stick roses; and some other hand had propped up, between the two, a large and lovely unframed photograph—one of Antonia’s studies of Jane in childhood. Lilia, eyeing another space, pictured her amber salad bowl here also, wondered where it had got to, but lost heart. Under a window was a scroll-ended sofa: she took off her hat, lay down, disposed the folds of her dress and began a headache. After some time, Fred opened the door from the dining-room, and said dubiously: ‘We were thinking of having supper.’
    ‘Do as you please,’ said she.
    ‘What about you?’
    ‘Today, you surpassed yourself.’
    ‘Oh?—sorry.’
    ‘Abandoning us. I did not know where to look.’
    He blinked and said: ‘Antonia just wants cheese. Where does Kathie keep it?’
    ‘You may well ask.’
    ‘Or isn’t there any?— I thought I’d been timing things about right.’
    ‘Left there in front of everyone, high and dry. Naturally, if I had been Antonia—’
    ‘Shut up,’ he begged, ‘there’s a good girl. Like me to bring you anything—tea?’
    ‘If you wish. Though what I need is an aspirin.’
    ‘Or go to bed why not?’
    ‘Because I would sooner be left in peace.’
    Seeing that he and she had for years slept at opposite ends of the house, her remark lacked what could have been one point: as notice to him to go it was so welcome that, out of self-reproach, he stopped there fidgeting in the doorway.
    ‘Close in here, isn’t it, if you’ve got a headache?’ He advanced, edged his way round the sofa, unbolted the window and pushed the sash up—outside waited the lovers’ evening; in the naive garden within the fence stocks were night-scented sweeter, old blue-pink roses were lusher, headier than in younger Junes. Lilia, a hand pressed over her eyes, lay like a waxen lady with clockwork breathing. ‘Better now,’ he asked hopefully, ‘or not?’
    She gave no sign.
    Something caught his eye. ‘You know your hat’s down here on the floor?’
    ‘Yes. Why?’
    ‘That hat of yours—wasn’t it new today?’
    ‘No; same as last year, but for the flower.’
    ‘It looked pretty fine on you, I thought.’
    She rolled her head away and said: ‘Then don’t step on it.’ Fred got himself clear of the danger zone, scratched one eyebrow, irresolutely looked at her, said: ‘I’ll be back with the tea, then?’
    ‘Or send Maud.’
    ‘Right. Later on, I may go out for a turn—can’t lock up, you see, till the girls get back, which mayn’t be for all hours. All hours,’ he pictured fondly, ‘dancing tonight.’ His protruding dark eyes, showing their whites, moved; in a trance he stood there all but hearing the music. ‘Only pity, pity there’s not a moon.’
    She cried aloud: ‘Moon—why should they have everything?’
    ‘Oh, come,’ he said, ‘you were young once.’
    ‘And if I was?—What’s that to do with you?’
    So he left her, as she seemed to him to want to be left, alone. And so there she still was, awake in the darkness when—after how long?—Jane, back, came wandering through.
    Antonia, on her unwilling way to bed, round about midnight looked into the girl’s bedroom. Her nostrils caught a reek of hot wick, as from a candle hastily blown out; but Jane either was sound asleep or chose to seem so—which was the more forbidding. Either way, music was off the air; the day was over; nothing now interposed between Antonia and the grave-lonely night—slopping a trail of drink from her full tumbler, she pitched away down the passage to her own door. Jane waited only to hear that door shut, was wary a minute longer, then