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Trents were telling me— Oh, Hugo, the Trents are coming over to tennis tomorrow, specially for you and Francie. And the Thompsons are coming, and I believe the Hartigans. The Hartigan girls are still all there, you’ll be surprised to hear. Nobody seems to marry them—and oh, a Colonel and Mrs. Boatley are coming, and three or four of the Rutlands—”
    “Five,” said Lois.
    “—Anyhow, several Rutlands. Everyone’s so delighted to hear that you and Francie are back.”
    “The Trents,” said Lois to Mr. Montmorency, with indignation, “swear that you and they are related. But you are not, surely? It is a perfect obsession of theirs.”
    When he said he supposed that he was, through an aunt’s marriage, she became pensive. It seemed odd that even the Trents should have a closer claim than she had—though it was she who had been humming with agitation the whole morning. The sweet peas in the urn before them bore evidence to her agitation: they all slanted to the west like a falling haystack. It was true she had hoped nothing more of him, but he still was in shadow, faintly, from the kindly monolith of her childhood. What he might have been, what he persisted in being, met in her mind with a jar, with a grate of disparity. The face she had watched sleeping— wiped clear of complexity, quiet but so communicative in stillness that, watching, she seemed to have shared in some kind of suspense, stayed—like the bright blur from looking too long at a lamp—over the face now turned to her, intelligent, dulled, with its sub-acid smile. She was likely to think of him now as a limitation, Mrs. Montmorency’s limitation; something about Mrs. Montmorency that was a pity. The Trents could have him.
    “I expect,” she said slightingly, “you are related to everyone.”
    “The longer one lives in this country,” he all too agreeably said, “the more likely that seems.”
    Yet she had been certain she felt him looking at her while she argued with Uncle Richard about the guns. Seeking a likeness, perhaps. It was this consciousness that had lent her particular fervour—though she was interested in the guns. Though when she turned round his profile was turned away—in, it seemed, the most scornful repudiation.
    He had, as a matter of fact, been looking at her, but without intention and with a purely surface observation of detail. When she turned away, the light from behind ran a finger round the curve of her jaw. When she turned his way, light took the uncertain dinted cheek-line where, under the eyes, flesh was patted on delicately over the rise of the bone. Her eyes, long and soft-coloured, had the intense brimming wandering look of a puppy’s; in repose her lips met doubtfully, in a never determined line, so that she never seemed to have quite finished speaking. Her face was long, her nose modelled down from the bridge then finished off softly and bluntly, as by an upward flick of the sculptor’s thumb. Her chin had emphasis, seemed ready for determination. He supposed that unformed, anxious to make an effect, she would marry early.
    “Danielstown can’t have been so exciting when you were here before,” said Lois to Mrs. Montmorency.
    But Mrs. Montmorency, in an absence of mind amounting to exaltation, had soared over the company. She could perform at any moment, discom-fitingly, these acts of levitation. She was staring into one of the portraits.

CHAPTER FOUR
    LOIS was sent upstairs for the shawls; it appeared that a touch of dew on the bare skin might be fatal to Lady Naylor or Mrs. Montmorency. On the stairs, her feet found their evening echoes; she dawdled, listening. When she came down everybody was on the steps—at the top, on the wide stone plateau —the parlourmaid looking for somewhere to put the coffee tray. Mrs. Montmorency sat in the long chair; her husband was tucking a carriage rug round her knees. “If you do that,” Lois could not help saying, “she won’t be able to walk about, which is