Chapter II

SHE MEETS A GHOST

She sat before the mirror, dressing and redressing her hair until it had the neatness of a wig. Two candles burned on either hand, and silver vessels gleamed upon the muslin-draped table. Her big white room was dim as a church at vespers where only one altar is lit. Grave and careful to do all things in order, a priestess ministering to pride, she put on her black velvet gown. It had come out of its lavender-scented bag two or three times every winter since it was bought, five years ago, for the future Lord Llangattoc’s coming of age. Last week the dressmaker from Llanon had been fetched in the luggage cart to bring it up to date. But still it did not look quite in the fashion. That was as it should be, Gwenllian told herself. Half the better people at tonight’s Hunt Ball would be what Dick called dowdy. Had she the money to waste, she would not make herself look like a milliner’s assistant to please him. Plain black enriched the cross of antique emeralds she was hanging about her neck and the long ear-rings hooked through the pierced lobes of her ears. Perhaps, she thought, staring gloomily at their winking reflections, she was wearing them for the last time. They were the only heirlooms left in her jewel case.

For she had sold her own and her mother’s brooches—sapphires held with claws of gold to a bar, a flying pheasant and a fox’s mask in diamonds. Her grandmother’s amethysts, in their ponderous setting, bracelets, necklace and lockets heavy to wear—she had sacrificed them all, first taking out the locks of family hair and burning them, that they might not fall into the hands of strangers. Her great-grandmother’s fragile seed pearls were gone, too, her empire tiara and fan-shaped combs of inlaid tortoiseshell. It had torn Gwenllian to part with each of these possessions, but since she had two sons and would never have a daughter, it was better to sell jewellery than land. Money must be raised somehow, for, though she saved, Dick spent.

She might more easily have forgiven him the large debts he incurred when he went abroad “for his health,” than his incurable self-indulgence and folly in small matters. Had she not told him, “we can’t afford to go to the Hunt Ball this year?” Yet go he would, and take Frances with him.

“If you won’t ask your sister to stay for Christmas, I shall,” he had blustered.

“Why should we have her again? Once a year is quite enough.”

“Because it’s a pleasant change to hear someone laughing in this tomb of a place.”

“You used to say my sister talked the most arrant nonsense,” she answered.

To this he had made no reply, and she had repeated in rising anger what he had said five or six years ago. “You called her London friends ‘a lot of queer fish, and her children ‘unlicked cubs,’ and her husband ‘ a highbrow prig ’ who wore his hair too long. You were surprised that a man who had been in the Navy—”

“Oh, shut up,” Dick had interrupted with the schoolboy rudeness that had lately become his habit. “Frances is a damned good sort. I wish you were more like her.”

She had been furious. But better Frances, she had decided, than one of those dancing partners with peroxide curls whom Dick picked up in the South of France; and with an ill grace, she had yielded. Now Frances must needs bring her husband with her and all three of her hungry children, who read the most unsuitable books in the library and put them back in the wrong order.

“As Stanley’s come, you’ll have to go to the ball with us to make our numbers even,” Dick had said with an obvious lack of enthusiasm, and she had answered curtly that he had no need to instruct her in her duties as a hostess.

To make matters worse, Dick had broken the back axle of his car, and a hired taxi must take them twenty miles into the county town. More money would be thrown away. Why had he allowed that accident to happen? Why had he been driving over to the Lewis Vaughans’ at all, Gwenllian enquired of her frowning reflection? Since their noisy neighbour had married the prettier of the two Williams girls, Dick was to be seen with them at point-to-point races, at sheep-dog trials, at agricultural shows, at the picnics at which these silly young people squan- dered their time. What a fool he looked, carrying wraps and baskets for the bride, or keeping her sister amused with the inane prattle that a giggling flapper enjoyed! There was nothing wrong in it, perhaps, but that made it harder to forgive. Gwenllian would have respected him more if violent passion for another woman had made him unfaithful to herself, for, beneath her conventional abhorrence of lax morals, was an unconfessed sympathy with the splendid sinners of romance. But for a petty philanderer, who wasted the deep river of love in babbling, shallow streams of flirtation, she had nothing but scorn. She wondered disdainfully, as she swept downstairs, who would make a fool of Dick this evening—the bride, or her silly sister, or some new girl, empty and vulgar as all the girls were whom the Goldmans brought in their train.

Frances was in the hall, laughing and dragging her husband through the tango. Her gown was patterned in autumn leaves, red, gold and copper. Gwenllian thought it too florid, and her amber beads unsuitable for a full dress occasion. Like a Bacchante she looked, with her unruly black hair, her animated face and lithe movements. How crimson her lips were, how richly tawny her cheeks. Gwenllian did not like to see her sister look so naturally young. She frowned, but had to concede that Frances was handsome to-night.

“Hello,” called a happy voice from below, and Frances danced to the foot of the stairs. As she raised her head the lamp light shone on the long curve of her throat, golden with health. “My dear,” she cried, her bright eyes according the admiration which Gwenllian had grudged to her, “you look magnificent—like an Empress.”

And for an instant Gwenllian perceived that, if she herself had been a happy woman, she might have liked her handsome younger sister. But such bitter insight did not outlast dinner. Frances chattered foolishly, Gwenllian told herself, to account for her own irritation. What bad taste it was to mimic Lady Llangattoc merely because she was a trifle self-important! Throughout the long cold drive that followed Frances continued in irrepressible high spirits, keeping Dick and her husband in perpetual laughter. Stanley was a lean brown man with a tight mouth and very blue eyes. He spoke little except when he was defending his Utopian reforms. Gwenllian dismissed them all under two heads: “pampering criminals and naughty children instead of punishing them as they deserve; and fancying he can stop war by allowing a lot of deceitful foreigners to argue.” She never listened to him when he was talking such nonsense, nor did she think much of him at any other time. He was a fool, she considered, to take Frances seriously when she ought to have been laughed at, and to laugh at her, as he was doing tonight, when he should have reproved her lack of dignity.

“My dear goose, you are funny,” he exclaimed once. And Gwenllian, sitting erect in her comer, as far as possible from Dick, thought contemptuously, Fancy that joke not having grown stale yet! For Frances and Stanley had been married years longer than she and Dick. She grew increasingly bored and annoyed by the nearness of three such fools, laughing, laughing at nothing at all, in the cramped jolting darkness of the taxi. To her the drive seemed unending.

But they ceased, at last, to be flung against one another, and instead of the rutted roads and dark hedgerows, Gwenllian saw the sleek wet pavements of the town. Brightly the shops flashed by in a blur of raindrops on the window-panes. At the entrance to the old coaching inn, a crowd of simple folk waited to see what little they could beneath their neighbours’ umbrellas of the gentry with whom they were not privileged to dance. As the Llanon taxi slowed into its place in the queue of motor-cars that were crawling up, one by one, to a muddy strip of red carpet, Dick craned out of the window.

“There’s the bride arriving. I say, isn’t she holding her skirts high! I shall chaff her about that … By Jove, the Goldmans have brought a dazzler this time! Bet you I get introduced to her before you do, my boy!”

Gwenllian moved to avoid the pressure of his knees against her own. The stupidity of all he said would have sickened her less, she decided, if she had not always been able to predict it to a word.

“Must I remind you, for your dear Frances’s sake, not to dance out of our own party all night,” she stung at him in a whisper as she alighted.

Inside the lounge, old ladies wearing antiquated capes and fleecy head-shawls were nodding and smiling their way to the foot of the shallow stairs. Others were coming down, showing their bosoms and their diamonds. At their heels, waving laughing signals to friends below, fluttered a bevy of country- bred girls. Their hair and their skirts were cut short, but they had the same starry eyes and radiant, flushed faces that Gwenllian remembered at dances long ago.

“How pretty they all look,” Frances exclaimed. “What fun it is!”

But Gwenllian answered not a word, for her throat was tight and her eyes smarted. In painladen silence she went up to the room she remembered so well, with its sagging ceiling and a pierglass that tilted too far forward or swung right back. Another girl was before it now. “Look at the rotten thing!” she cried. “Absurd,” was the word Gwenllian had used. There, still, stood the vast mahogany dressing-table with clumsy, twisted legs, and upon it the pin-cushion, big as a baby’s pillow, covered in white muslin over pink sateen. A coloured print of “Bubbles ” hung on the wall, and a gory battle scene of Lady Butler’s, mercifully reproduced in black and white. The former paper of roses and ribbons had been replaced by one of Japanese figures dwarfed by giant wistaria, and a meagre fireplace with ugly green tiles had supplanted the generous one with hobs. Gwenllian did not approve of these changes, any more than she did of Nancy Lloyd’s niece, who would never be the belle her aunt was once, and who was actually putting paint on her lips. But there—bless her!—was Betto, with the same very large cap and the three warts with the three hairs on each. Only—alas!—now the hairs were white. She was addressing the mother of a debutante as “Miss Dolly,” speaking through the pins she had always held in her mouth. Frances gave her a hug that almost caused the pins to be swallowed, and vowed she was grown prettier than ever.

“Go you on, Miss Frances,” she cried, delighted. “You’re the same hoyden of a young lady ever you were! Fancy any gentleman asking you to marry him!”

“He didn’t, Betto, till I’d made it clear that he’d got to.”

“Oh, duwch! Isn’t the gel a caution,” the ancient chambermaid appealed to the company in general.

Newcomers to the district looked surprised, and Gwenllian intervened with an enquiry after Betto’s rheumatism, thus making clear her great age and explaining her privileged familiarity.

When they were downstairs again and had found their escort in the press, they pushed their way along a passage that reeked of stale beer, damp whitewash and linoleum. Music came in broken waves above the babble of voices at the ball-room door.

“They’re off! Tally ho! Get to it! Get to it!” cried a youth with a face as pink as his coat.

“The Lord Lieutenant isn’t here yet,” cried an older man, hurrying past. “Stop the band there! Can’t possibly begin till he’s opened the ball!”

“Oh, I say, what rot,” grumbled young Goldman, whose swarthy glance Gwenllian was careful not to meet. “Are we to have our evening messed up for that old fogey?”

“How too pricelessly formal and Victorian,” exclaimed his pretty companion.

And Gwenllian in disgust heard Dick say, “Hello Goldman! You might be a sport and introduce me.

She turned away to join in scattered talk with people of her own kind.

“How d’ye do? Ages since I had the pleasure of meetin’ you last!”

“Have a good run the other day?”

“Fourteen brace o’ pheasants. Not bad, what?” “… the magistrates have grown too slack to convict.”

“Well, look what a crew they are on the bench nowadays! Scarcely a gentleman among ’em!”

“Thank you so much. I’ll ask Mother.”

Frances had become the centre of a group of former admirers. How was it, Gwenllian wondered, that, with such Bohemian ways and subversive views, her sister retained the liking of so many quite nice men? She herself was marooned with her brother-in-law. Making no more pretence of enjoying each other’s company than good manners required, they danced together. When this duty was performed, they leaned against the wall, exchanging a few civil comments, but both were absorbed in watching, he his wife, and she her husband. It was not love or pride, not even jealousy, that kept her eyes on Dick. To spy upon him with disapproval was her habit. What silly thing was he saying now to make Ena Williams laugh in that blatant way? Why had he attached himself to the Lewis Vaughans the moment they arrived? People would imagine that he was in the bride’s tow as usual. Frances dis- entangled herself from the old friends pressing for dances and returned, radiant, to ask, “Will you dance the next with me, Stanley?”

“Don’t I always hang about waiting for orders?” he smiled. “Who were all your adorers?”

“Frances,” Gwenllian was prompted to interrupt, “your hair looks as if it might come down. Hadn’t you better go up and make yourself presentable?” But the conductor of the band, raised on a palm decorated platform, had flourished his baton. The strife of drum and saxophone was renewed, making Gwenllian wince. She turned her back, not caring to watch her sister closely held in the arms of a ridiculously doting husband. Nor could she endure to see Dick, jigging and grinning and rocking his shoulders to and fro, while his wife stood by without a partner! Had he abandoned even the attempt to behave like a gentleman? She rejoined the crowd of elderly folk by the door and was presently sitting out in the lounge with a lethargic judge.

“I come here to support the Hunt,” he informed her. “One must shew up in the ball-room, don’t you know, to encourage the young ’uns.”

“D’you find they need encouraging these days?” she asked with a bitter laugh.

He looked at her sideways. “You don’t much like the present generation? Well, I confess that I shall be glad to get away from them myself for a quiet game of bridge. Will you take a hand?”

She made excuses. Surely she was not come to that yet? And she remembered how she had delighted to waltz all night and had marvelled that any but the infirm could keep to their chairs while dance music was calling. She had never tired of dancing then. At two or three in the morning, when the fiddles played John Peel and then God Save the Queen, she could have cried with vexation that joy should be so soon ended. How far away, how long ago, seemed those few hours of happiness!

After the judge had left her, she sat alone behind the screen that hid their two chairs, and tried to nerve herself for a return to the ball-room. Dick would have, for appearances’ sake, to ask her for at least one dance or two. He danced well, she sup- posed, in this jerky modern fashion. Like a clockwork toy he looked. But she felt discomfort in yielding herself to so angular a rhythm, and she detested dancing with him. His slightest touch, since Richard’s birth, aroused loathing in her. Perhaps, seeing her neglected among the chaperons, a few courteous old men would lead her away and trample on her toes. They would stumble with her round the room where once she had skimmed and darted like a swallow. Still, she could not hide all night. And sighing, she was about to rise, when a black silk skirt rustled against the sheltering screen.

“This will do, dear. No one will overhear us,” said a voice she knew.

And another, equally familiar, answered. “Yes, my dear, do go on.”

The speakers were Doctor Roberts’s wife and the sister of Mr. Price the solicitor. They were proud, Gwenllian knew, of being admitted to the Hunt Ball. Afterwards, they would boast to members of the Mothers’ Union, whose husbands were in trade, of their intimate acquaintance with the misdoings of their betters. Gwenllian gathered much useful knowledge of local affairs from Mrs. Doctor Roberts. But sometimes, she suspected, the lady withheld information for fear of giving offence. To Miss Price, the friend of her bosom, she might talk more openly, and, with a scornful grimace, Gwenllian stayed to eavesdrop.

“It’s gone beyond a joke,” she heard the soft Pembrokeshire voice cooing. “Of course the Doctor never breathes a word to me. You’ve no idea the discretion I have to put up with from that man!” Miss Price made clicking sounds of sympathy, and Gwenllian, in her place of hiding, smiled.

“But he’s truly vexed,” the Doctor’s wife went on, “I know from his looks whenever he’s called there, to see her marriage such an utter failure.”

“What could you expect?” demanded Miss Price with self-righteous gusto. “I never could have made myself a laughing-stock, marrying a man young enough to be my son.”

Gwenllian stiffened.

“Of course it was a sad mistake. But he needn’t run after his neighbour’s wife so scandalously. All the servants at the Lewis Vaughans are talking.”

“His neighbour’s wife,” exclaimed Miss Price. “I heard it was the unmarried one with whom he was behaving so badly. Miss Powell the Schools was saying she felt it her duty to write Mrs. Williams a letter about her daughter—an anonymous letter, of course.”

“It’s both of them, if you must know, dear,” said Mrs. Roberts, more than ever resembling a wood-pigeon in the gentleness of her tone. “It’s truly shocking. And when that over-trusting husband, young Vaughan, finds out—”

Miss Price drew in her breath as though she were sucking some juicy fruit.

“They say he has a violent temper, once it’s roused,” murmured Mrs. Roberts.

“What a frightful scandal there’s bound to be then!”

“Yes indeed. Poor, poor Gwenllian! How I pity her!”

“So do I, though, of course, she’s only herself to blame. My brother says that husband of hers will soon have squandered every penny of the money she married him for. The estate’s already mortgaged as heavily as ever it was under the old Squire.”

“You don’t say so!”

“Yes, but I was to keep it an absolute secret.”

“Things like that are bound to come out, my dear. Poor Gwenllian, with all her virtues, was always much too stuck up. I’m afraid the whole country will soon see her pride have a fall.” Gwenllian started up with the mad intention of flinging down the screen on top of the two gossips. But she controlled her fury, and sat down again until the crowd of laughing couples coming past after another dance enabled her to slip away undetected. She drifted through the red plush drawing-room and gazed up the stairs. Everywhere young men and maidens were sitting two by two, looking at one another with laughter or love in their glances.

“You know I haven’t another thought in the world,” someone whispered from behind a bank of flowers as she passed by. Her own sweetheart had once said the same fond foolish thing to her. “But you,” he had added, “think only of your position as mistress of your father’s house.” “I don’t! I don’t!” she had protested. “I’m always thinking of you.” And yet she had let him go. Aimless now and alone, she walked down a passage leading to the garden. Here once she had been led, all eagerness, her finger tips in a shy flutter on his sleeve. A curtain hung across the entrance. She drew it aside, and in the half darkness saw a tall youth stooping to kiss a girl. His encircling arm was black against the pallor of her dress. She was turned away, her little head and slim bare shoulders drooped from him as though she were afraid. But as Gwenllian retreated, she saw the girl turn round and, with a sudden gesture of passionate response, fling her arms round her lover’s neck and strain upward to the lips that sought her own. It might have been herself! How fast her heart beat with disquieting recollections! No longer caring where she went, she let herself be swept by the returning tide of dancers back into the ball-room.

Supporters of the Hunt no longer impeded the way. There lingered only such mammas as surveyed their daughters for an excuse to interfere, and a few bald men who watched the dancing that they might complain how ungraceful it was grown. The amiable old men were gone to enjoy themselves at the supper- or the card-table. Gwenllian listened to the talk of those ill-natured elders who chose not to let youth alone. Their discontent accorded with her own.

“The banging of this infernal nigger music sets my teeth on edge.”

“Walkin’ up and down! Did you ever see anything so ridiculous? There’s nothing in it!”

“ No, by Jove! In our day we danced. I had to change my collar three times in an evening.”

“Don’t you think he holds his partner unnecessarily close?”

“Oh my dear, they all do now.”

“Well, I think it ought to be stopped. It’s really quite disgusting.”

“One would not have dreamed of receiving them before the war.”

“That’s never your youngest? Dear me, how sadly time flies!”

“… got herself talked about with old Pelham’s heir.”

“They tried to hush it up.”

. four, plain unmarriageable daughters.”

“…drummed out of his regiment…”

Clack, clack, clack went their spiteful tongues. Some of them were people of whom she was accustomed to approve. To-night she hated them, everyone. They would be clacking about her affairs soon, blaming her, pitying her, dragging her pride, her cherished domestic privacy through the mud of their mean gossip, as those two common women had already dared to do. She, whose morals had been stricter than any of theirs, would come off no better with them than an adulteress. They wouldn’t spare the pride they had once envied. But she’d face them all out. Over their wagging grey heads she stared, smiling a smile of steel, while the young couples swirled past her, smiling because they were happy.

After a while she noticed the broad shoulders and head of a tall man, standing with his back to her. His hair was as dark as her own and refused to be sleeked down. The glimpse she had of his firm profile set her dreaming of the young man she had loved so long ago. His hair, too, had been defiant. But it had been thicker, more glossy than this stranger’s. She began to take an interest in him, forgetting her anger with the rest of the world. Who was he? Why did he stand aloof from the dancers, gazing at them with an intent sadness that had been communicated to her even by the fragmentary glimpse that she had had of his face? It was not her custom to shew curiosity about a man whom she did not know, and she surprised herself by edging through the crowd to make a closer inspection of this one. Look at him more nearly, she must, she knew not why. Many old acquaintances tried to detain her with their shew of affability, but she evaded them all. Lady Llangattoc was signalling from her chair against the wall, but Gwenllian was purposefully blind. At last she was divided from the stranger only by an osprey plume that whisked to and fro in an Edwardian head-dress. She slipped past the obstruction and stood close behind him. He turned round at once as if he had felt her presence. He had the large square jaw that she admired. Perhaps he was fifty years of age. But she found him very handsome, far handsomer than any younger man in the room. A spasm of recognition contracted his mouth.

“Hello,” he exclaimed.

She stared at him, frozen in surprise.

“How d’you do?” he said, and in a very low tone, he added, “Bitty.”

No-one had called her that for—it must be twenty years! And suddenly she felt a flutter and jump of her heart, startling, exciting, of promise, as full of wonder as the earliest movement of a first child within the womb. She held out her hand. He took it, and she looked down at their clasped hands as from a very long way off. It was not often that hers was made by comparison to seem so small. There were little black hairs on the back of his great hand. She did not remember them, nor the veins standing out, raised and blue. It was aged, but it felt the same—very strong, warm, enclosing! How that tormenting new music thumped and clattered! The room seemed to be rocking with the dancers.

She was shaken by its vibration. Never in her life had she fainted. I mustn’t faint, she told herself. I can’t faint! I won’t faint.

“Isn’t it hot?” she heard a voice saying that had once been her own. It had ceased to be under her control. It made a surging sound like that of the sea in a big shell. There was a shell on the nursery mantelpiece. She used to hold it to her ear. He had kissed her for the first time in the old nursery at home. She had been arranging a vase of red dahlias, and the flowers had dropped through her fingers to the floor. So that was why she had grown red dahlias ever since! She had forgotten the reason—but not the kiss. Did any woman ever forget the first kiss of her first love? It was that, not any later experience, which deflowered her.

“Supposing we find somewhere to sit down,” she heard his voice suggest

“Yes. By a window, if you don’t mind.”

“Take my arm.”

Once again she laid her hand on that sleeve which sent so vibrant a tremor through her finger tips. “Thank you,” she murmured. “These crushes always make me feel rather breathless.”

“Terrible mob,” he said, staring straight in front of him with set face.

“Yes,” she agreed, because she must needs say something. “But the band is good, don’t you think? They keep such excellent time.”

She had loathed the beat, beat, beat, as of tom-toms, arousing savages to an obscene orgy. It was not fit that white men and women of breeding should dance to such music. Thank heaven it had stopped! Why did it echo still in her leaping pulses?

He did not lead her in the wake of the laughing talkative stream that flowed from the ball-room in search of secluded sitting-out places, but took her to the window embrasure farthest from the dowagers and the band. He found her a chair and she dropped down on to it, her knees weak, as though she had been running until she was exhausted. He flung open a window and the icy air flowed in over her naked arms and neck.

Once they had gone swimming together in the river below her home. It was very early on a June morning before even the country folk were astir to wonder at such “goings on.” She remembered the quivering white mist in the valleys, and the hill-tops appearing like islands of gold. How sweet the flowering may trees and the lilac had been! How the dew-drenched grass had sparkled, and the birds twittered! He and she had seemed to be the only pair of lovers in a new world—a world miraculously beautiful, created by a kindly God for their delight. They had taken hands and run down through the shrubbery together, startling a heron from the pool where he was fishing and two otters at play upon the bank. The plunge into cold water had been invigorating and had set her more than ever aglow.

But through the long day afterwards, when he was gone, she had been dull, so dull!

She gazed across the polished spaces of the floor from which the dancing feet were departed and thought how empty, how drear, had been the days and weeks that had dragged out into years, since she drove him away disappointed. She had grasped at the shadow of Plâs Einon and let go the substance of her happiness. Now her happiness was returned as a spectre to torment her. And with a strange terror, as if she were conversing with a ghost, she began to ask him why he was here and what he had been doing since they parted. Their talk seemed remote and thin as that of two souls in purgatory. Yet her spoken questions and his answers were plain enough. It was what they left unsaid that made their silences so hard to bear. He was staying with the Lloyds of Dolforgan, he told her. They had often urged him to revisit the district but, somehow, he had never cared to do so. Gwenllian longed, at that, to cry out in an agony of repentance. Instead, she forced herself to go on plying him with conventional enquiries. Yes. He had become a Brigadier-General during the war; had seen enough service to last his lifetime; had unexpectedly inherited a property, and retired, “to make a garden,” he said, “and replant some of the million trees that were cut down.”

“On your estate in Norfolk?” she asked.

And he answered, looking at her mournfully, “Oh, not there, only. I have an odd nightmare—quite often—trees, like the long avenues in Flanders after heavy shell fire, broken off, cut short, mutilated. Can’t quite explain why it should be so horrible to remember things like that. But it is.”

She shivered and answered, “Yes, I know.”

For a long while neither of them spoke again. At last he said: “I don’t care much for the flat country. Sometimes I’ve half a mind to sell out and come back to Wales.”

Then we might have married after all, she mused, without my having to give up my own country for more than a few years, or the way of life to which I clung. She felt like one standing upon the scaffold with the noose about her neck, to whom the chaplain should say, “Let us contemplate the joyful years that would have stretched before you, had you but been more wise.”

The music struck up and another dance began. After a while a stout, elaborately preserved woman came up, escorted by her last partner. Her painted lips wore a hard smile.

“Here you are!” she cried with a shrew’s flourish of joviality. “So like a husband to forget his duty to dance with his wife!”

He did not stop to introduce her to Gwenllian, but slid away, looking as dazed and miserable as she was feeling. She stared after him from her cold embrasure, until someone—she scarcely knew who—stood over her claiming the promised dance she had forgotten.

“I’ve lost my programme,” she said, vaguely, holding it in her hands. “I seem to have lost everything.”

Later in the evening, the ghost of her sweetheart came back to her. “Will you dance this with me?” She looked up at him, trembling, hoping, she dared not think for what. “I’ve asked for one of Joyce’s old waltzes. D’you remember?”

Could she ever forget? For the thousandth time she remembered her coming-out dance—her white dress, her stiffening dread of tearing its many frills— and how, meeting him, she had discovered that she could reverse, and had lost her nervousness and been happy and proud, giving not another thought to anything, not even to her dropping hairpins.

The lilting, sensuous music began. Soon elderly sentimentalists were looking in from the card-room to nod and beat time to the gay pathos of an old tune. But in January of the year 1926 few young couples could dance an old-fashioned waltz. Those accustomed to walk their way through a “hesitation,” knew not what to make of this faster, more exciting melody. So Gwenllian and her lover sped unhindered, like swift skaters upon ice. No man had ever waltzed, she believed, as he did, making of his body and of hers instruments on which the music played, until they were one with it, one with each other, no longer a man and a woman dancing in time to a tune, but the creations of a sweetly, a passionately vibrating song—a love song—the Song of Songs! She forgot her age and her sorrows and the years that the locust had eaten, forgot that she was an unhappy wife, an over-anxious mother, the care-worn mistress of a household burdened with debt and threatened with dissolution. She thought no more of her endangered future than of her embittered past. There was an end to the long war between her unsatisfied woman’s body and her dominating mascu- line spirit. She loved. She danced. It was enough. She had no wish to rule or lead. There was no will left in her but to abandon her will to his. Wherever he moved, she followed, as easily as one who, in a dream possesses the power of flight. Never had they danced with so delicious a rhythm, even when he and she were boy and girl, supple, full of vigour, idyl- lically in love. For then she had been virgin in spirit and in flesh. Now she knew with what fiery, joyous self-surrender she could have given herself to the man she had refused, and, in her passionate thought, a shadow fell across her motherhood. They were not his children she had borne. Therefore, they had polluted her. Never again, she thought for one wild moment, would she be able to feel their little fond- ling hands without a shudder of disgust. But she was in his arms: nothing mattered that had been or that might be.

Why had the music of their bridal ceased? Why was she standing, dizzy and forlorn? Oh God, she thought, could I not have died while I was dancing?

It was torment unendurable to be awakened to the life she must henceforth lead. She had dreamed she was a happy girl again, dressed in white as for her wedding. But staring down now at her gown she saw that it was black, and it reminded her that she was growing old. Elderly neighbours began to buzz round her like stinging flies.

“Capital! Never saw a better performance in my life!”

“I say, Gwenllian, you and your partner ought to go in for exhibition dancing!”

“Who is he?”

“A ghost,” she answered, and saw her questioner’s mouth drop open in astonishment.

As arbitrarily as they had begun, they ceased to pester her and stood upright and rigid. She supposed that the band must be playing God save the King. But what she heard was only a noise like thunder. When it was over, she looked up, imploring him with her gaze to stay.

“I must go.”

“Why?”

“My wife’s waiting.” And he added in a dull, expressionless tone, “We shan’t ever meet again, I’m afraid.”

She could not bear it. “Oh no! Why not?” she gasped. “You promised—you said, I mean, something about returning to Wales?”

“That’s only what I dream of.” He spoke heavily as before. “My wife’s rooted to Norfolk.”

In desperation she asked what she must not ask. “Are you very fond of her?”

“We have children,” he answered.

“Yes. So have I.”

Side by side they stood in a leaden silence. They were no longer a pair of lovers to whom no other people in the world were of importance. They were the father and the mother of a family, members of the Established Church and of the landed gentry, staunch upholders of sound old-fashioned morality, believers in the finality of marriage.

Slowly she laid her hand in his. She thought he was going to speak, for his lips moved.

“Good-bye then,” was all he said, at last.

“Good—” she began, and could say no more.

When she had watched him go towards his wife, she went into the hall, because people seemed to be going that way. I suppose I must go home, she reflected, staring about her, bemused, and perceiving a flutter of leave-taking. Parents were trying to shepherd their charges away; young people to prolong their noisy farewells. Amid the cheerful herd, shaking hands and kissing, the laughter, the running up and down stairs, Gwenllian felt sick and stunned. She sat down abruptly on the nearest chair. To steady her sight, that was become blurred, she fixed her eyes on the first man she saw before her. He was insignificant, not worth a glance, but he would serve her turn. His chest was flat, his slender shoulders sloped, and his mouth was too soft and small for a man’s mouth. There was scarcely any colour in his face and his little moustache and eyebrows were pale as straw. He had blue eyes of the light shade she disliked. They were at present bloodshot. He’s been drinking too much champagne, she told herself. He looks the sort of poor weak thing who’d drink. Suddenly he returned her stare and scowled; and she knew him.