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shore, as a shark might be seen cutting through water.

4
    Watching Christabel
    The person who thought Christabel was getting away with altogether too much these days was really quite disgusted by the scene at Lark Manor that Easter Sunday: with Christabel presiding so airily over the large lunch table.
    'Or rather her husband's lunch table,' the person threw in as an afterthought. But the person knew better than to put this kind of sentiment, however justifiable, into words: it was better to hug these feelings to oneself - until absolutely the right moment presented itself. Events this morning had rather proved that, hadn't they? So the person continued to mask both anger and repulsion under an impassive front.
    All the same, the person knew that Christabel was really rather frightened by now. Under all that make-up Christabel wished after all she hadn't come back to Lark Manor.
    Maybe it would have been better to have stayed in London and been poor and sick and sad and lonely. In spite of having no rewarding work. No marvellous lover. And getting older and uglier and not having beauty creams and hair dyes and perfumes (the smell of her lily-of-the-valley scent filled the house all over again now she was back) and people to wait on her and her lovely dresses such as that soft hyacinth-blue just the colour of her eyes, and jew els. How many kinds of blue jewel Christabel was wearing today! A long string of turquoise mixed with the pearls with the sapphire clasp, the Cartwright pearls, she'd got them out of the bank pretty quickly, hadn't she? The aquamarine ring, on the other hand, the one she always wore, she'd taken with her when she went. At lunch, of course, she was wearing it on her left hand. Her white hand, creamy and be-creamed, caressing and now once more caressed.
    In spite of all this Christabel was going to die and the warm soft round body under the yielding cashmere would grow cold and be put in the  dank rich mouldy earth of Larminster Churchyard. So all the creams and lotions and perfumes were not going to save her, and the blue jewels, all of them, all of them save the aquamarine and perhaps that would be buried with her. would go back into the bank.
    Christabel had this knowledge now: Christabel was frightened under that sweet sorrowing manner of hers.
    'Please don't torture me,' she had said.
    Admiring the arrangement of spring flowers in the centre of the dining-room table - scillas and narcissi, blue and white like the china -the person decided not to be in such a hurry to end the game after all. Christabel's torture should not be ended too quickly. The prospect would make up for the fact that there might not after all be spring flowers on her grave, not even tulips, but something full blown like roses; the first big fat creamy roses, the Gloire de Dijon, which grew on the sheltered wall in the courtyard garden of Lark Manor in May. Roses, full-blown roses, were finally much more appropriate to Christabel, the person decided regretfully, than spring flowers. You had to admit that, Christabel's spring was long past.
    The person revelled in Christabel's discomfiture and Christabel's secret fear grew.
    Jemima Shore, on the other hand, thought that her hostess's aplomb was really quite remarkable. Under the circumstances. The circumstances which Cherry had hastily but vividly outlined to her on the road from Larmouth to the manor. Had the prodigal son been quite so urbane at the feast given in his honour by his father? Certainly this prodigal wife ra diated confidence, and even blith eness in her return.
    'Of course she is an actress - was an actress.' But Jemima, numbering a good many actors and actresses among her friends, knew that emotional control in private life was not necessarily allied to talent on the stage -even with a woman who had once been as celebrated as Christabel Herrick.
    Lunch was being handed round by a manservant, an elderly and distinguished-looking man in a very clean white jacket; he