The long drawing-room was cleared for dancing. Against the background of green-panelled walls the coloured shapes of dancing couples glided and revolved to the hot pulse of the music. Others sat and talked on chairs and sofas pushed back against the wainscot. The music stopped, the rhythmic movements of the dancers broke off into slow confusion and Ronny’s hostess took possession of him. “Come with me, Mr. Dakyn,” she said. “I want to introduce you to a very charming young friend of mine.”
He followed her, and in a moment found himself being introduced to Lucy Wendover. Finding that they were already acquainted, their hostess left them. “I thought it too bad that those two beautiful young creatures weren’t dancing together,” she whispered to a friend who stood near.
Ronny and Lucy agreed to sit out. “It’s funny, isn’t it, that we should meet by accident again,” he said. Lucy, for one of the rare occasions of her life, felt shy. Under the gaze of those lively, bright blue eyes of his, her usual self-possession deserted her and it was he, at first, who did most of the talking. He was in high spirits. In the presence of this beautiful girl, whose admiration he detected in her shyness, his charm of manner and appearance displayed itself at its brightest. He was amused, too, at this new defeat of Adrian’s secretiveness. It was another joke on the Little Man: he would rag him about it when he got home. But there was something more than amusement in it: there was also, though so deeply hidden that he himself did not consciously perceive it, a gratified sense of revenge taken on Adrian’s defection. Adrian had deserted him and had jealously guarded his supplanter from him, and now he and the supplanter were making friends on their own account.
They found a sofa in an anteroom. But if Lucy was here, it suddenly occurred to him, Adrian must be here too. It would be a better joke still if Adrian were to come into the anteroom now and find them talking. “I haven’t seen Adrian,” he said to Lucy, “but I suppose he’s here.”
Lucy looked quickly about the room. “Adrian? I didn’t know he was. I thought he didn’t care for dancing.”
“Oh, if you don’t know he’s here, he won’t be. I just took it for granted, because you are.”
Lucy laughed. “Then you imagine that …?” She hesitated over how to put it.
“Yes, that’ everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go,’ “said Ronny.
Lucy resented the assumption. “Oh, dear me, no,” she said. “We have lunch or dinner together sometimes and go to concerts, but we’re not quite inseparable.” Then, ashamed of the impulse to disown her friendship with Adrian, she added: “But I do like him. He’s a charming child and we’re very good friends.”
Ronny laughed. “Yes, he is, isn’t he? I keep forgetting he isn’t still a little boy at school. At school, you see, he was very much younger than me. He used to be my fag.”
“Was he very fond of music at school?”
“Rather,” said Ronny. “Wrapped up in it, as he is now. Not that he wasn’t good at games too, especially footer. I suppose he is pretty good at music?”
“Oh, very good indeed,” said Lucy enthusiastically.
“And you’re keen on music too?”
“Yes,” she said. “And so, you see, Adrian and I forgather over music. But he knows much more about it than I do. I used to work at it when I was his age, but I wasn’t good enough. I gave up working at it seriously some years ago.”
Lucy had lost some of her shyness now, but she still avoided his eyes. Through the screen of their talk she was acutely aware of his presence, his body leaning towards her, his gaze enveloping her; and when occasionally she ventured a fleeting glance at him she saw that, sure enough, his gay, blue eyes were fixed upon her as he talked. She had never been so immediately, so overpoweringly aware of anyone before. It was not his words nor his personality that were impressing themselves upon her so violently. It was his vivid, dazzling bodily presence which, it seemed, reached out beyond its tangible confines and enclosed her, entangled her in a net. She felt she must get up and go away, outside his influence; or else lean back, close her eyes, and happily abandon herself to it.
“When are you meeting Adrian again?” he was saying to her.
“Next week,” she replied. “Tuesday or Wednesday, I think.”
“How funny that I should have thought you were always together.”
“What made you think so? Not Adrian, surely?”
“No, not Adrian. In fact, Adrian hardly mentioned you. That’s what started me guessing, I suppose. It only shows how easy it is to make a bloomer when you start the Sherlock Holmes stunt.”
Lucy was greatly relieved. When Ronny had assumed that they were inseparable, she in turn had been led to assume that Adrian had told him that he was in love with her. But that fear was gone now. Adrian had said nothing, and for the good reason that there was nothing to say. Ronny had misunderstood his silence: that was all. It was a weight off her mind. Whatever she was feeling now, as she sat there in Ronny’s exciting and disturbing presence, she was doing no harm to Adrian. He might of course be a little piqued if Ronny and she.… Her mind, as if venturing into deep water, suddenly shivered ecstatically and shrank back.… Yes, piqued, but nothing more; and he would soon get over that.
Ronny, too, as he went home, assured himself that he was not harming the Little Man. Hadn’t Lucy made it quite clear that there was nothing between them? But the position was a little awkward, and when he got home he didn’t, after all, rag Adrian about having met Lucy again. In fact, he did not mention the meeting at all. And Lucy, when she met Adrian for a concert a few days later, also refrained from mentioning it.
But Adrian, his senses sharpened by his bitter misgiving, divined a change in her, a lack of her old, free warmth of manner, a pre-occupation in which he had no share; and, showing her nothing of what he was suffering, he withdrew into himself like a wounded bird and took his new and deeper draught of bitterness in silence.
When next they met it seemed, to his profound relief, that Lucy had come back to him. The tragic gulf which had so mysteriously and tacitly opened between them had as mysteriously and tacitly closed. The respite came to him as a delicious breath of springtime after a shattering storm. But the old triumphant security did not return. He lived in dread of the desolating loss of which he had had that brief but terrible foretaste. He dared not think of it for fear his thinking should in some unknown way conjure it up; but though he drove it from his thoughts, it lurked in some dark corner of his mind, a dull pain numbed but never quite healed.
Meanwhile chance worked against him. Ronny and Lucy had, it turned out, more than one acquaintance in common. They met again at a dance, and their unexpected meeting there betrayed them to each other. For the rest of that evening they were lost to all but themselves. The other guests glided past them like vague shadows, and far behind those shadows, even vaguer than they, the lonely ghost of Adrian shrank away unheeded into the outer darkness.