“It wouldn’t.  And you’d be nothing but a big man with a face I rather liked.  I suppose I should like your face.  We shouldn’t know each other, Jerrold.”

“No more we should.  It would be like not knowing Dad or Mummy or Colin.  A thing you can’t conceive.”

“It would be like not knowing anything at all ...  Of course, the best thing would be both.”

“Both?”

“Knowing each other and not knowing.”

“You can’t have it both ways,” he said.

“Oh, can’t you!  You don’t half know me as it is, and I don’t half know you.  We might both do anything any day.  Things that would make each other jump.”

“What sort of things?”

“That’s the exciting part of it—­we wouldn’t know.”

“I believe you could, Anne—­make me jump.”

“Wait till I get out to India.”

“You’re really going?”

“Really going.  Daddy may send for me any day.”

“I may be sent there.  Then we’ll go out together.”

“Will Maisie Durham be going too?”

“O Lord no.  Not with us.  At least I hope not ...  Poor little Maisie, I was a beast to say that.”

“Is she little?”

“No, rather big.  But you think of her as little.  Only I don’t think of her.”

They stood up; they stood close; looking at each other, laughing.  As he laughed his eyes took her in, from head to feet, wondering, admiring.

Anne’s face and body had the same forward springing look.  In their very stillness they somehow suggested movement.  Her young breasts sprang forwards, sharp pointed.  Her eyes had no sliding corner glances.  He was for ever aware of Anne’s face turning on its white neck to look at him straight and full, her black-brown eyes shining and darkening and shining under the long black brushes of her eyebrows.  Even her nose expressed movement, a sort of rhythm.  It rose in a slender arch, raked straight forward, dipped delicately and rose again in a delicately questing tilt.  This tilt had the delightful air of catching up and shortening the curl of her upper lip.  The exquisite lower one sprang forward, sharp and salient from the little dent above her innocent, rounded chin.  Its edge curled slightly forward in a line firm as ivory and fine as the edge of a flower.  As long as he lived he would remember the way of it.

And she, she was aware of his body, slender and tense under his white flannels.  It seemed to throb with the power it held in, prisoned in the smooth, tight muscles.  His eyes showed the colour of dark hyacinths, set in his clear, sun-browned skin.  He smiled down at her, and his mouth and little fawn brown moustache followed the tilted shadow of his nostrils.

Suddenly her whole body quivered as if his had touched it.  And when she looked at him she had the queer feeling that she saw him for the first time.  Never before like that.  Never before.

But to him she was the same Anne.  He knew her face as he knew his mother’s face or Colin’s.  He knew, he remembered all her ways.