Christian had betaken herself to a point on the avenue remote from the fray.  A run, she told herself, would have tranquillised her, and made things seem more normal, but there was no prospect of one.  “I’ll wait till this rat-hunt is over,” she thought, letting Joker stroll across the park towards a little lake, shining amidst bracken and bushes, a jewel dropped from heaven.  A couple of stiff-necked swans floated in motionless trance upon it; black water-hens flapped in flashing, splashing flight to safety as Christian came near; a string of patchwork coloured mandarin-ducks propelled themselves in jerks towards her, confident that any human being meant food.  Two gigantic turquoise dragon-flies rose, with a dry crackle of talc-like wings, from a dead log under Joker’s feet.  One of them swung round the horse’s head, and lit on his shaven neck.  It brooded there, apparently unperceptive of the difference of this resting place from the one that it had abandoned; its dull globes of eyes looked as if sight was the last purpose for which they were intended.  Joker stretched his long neck to nibble a willow twig, and the blue mystery, rising, remained poised over him for another moment of meditation, before it sailed away, sideways, on its own obscure occasions.

Christian sat in the sunshine, and thought about Larry, and wondered.  She knew now that what she felt for him was no new thing.  It had been with her always, not merely since the painting of her portrait, but always, unacknowledged yet implicit, ever since that first day when he had rescued her from Richard.  Her intensely criticising, analytic brain refused to surrender to vague emotion.  She was resolved to understand herself, to rationalise her overthrow.  It was the difference, for which that half-hour of sunset was responsible, in the degree of what she felt, that bewildered her.  Yesterday, she told herself, it was a deep, but well-controlled and respectable little stream.  To-day it was a flood.  “I must keep my feet,” she thought; “I must not be swept away!” The thought of him was sometimes overwhelming, like the fire of a summer noon; sometimes meditative, and wound about with memories, like twilight, and the song of the thrush; even at its least, it had been the glow that lives behind the northern horizon in midsummer, witnessing to the hidden glory, during darkness, or the wistful glimmer of stars.  Now, while the sun went higher, and all the hum of life rose, and the cries of the water-birds, the buzz of insects over the bright lake, became more insistent, and the blue and lovely morning spread and strengthened round her, criticism and analysis failed.  She could only think of him, helplessly, saying to herself what she had once heard a peasant woman say:  “My heart’d open when I thinks of him.”

Across the park came repeated notes from the horn, the baying of hounds, and the screams that celebrate with orthodox excitement the death of a fox.  The rat-hunt was over.  Joker lifted his spare, aristocratic head from the grass, and listened, with a wisp of dewy green stuff in his mouth.  Christian looked at her watch.  It was early still, not eight o’clock.  A grey horse and its rider came forth from the dark grove of laurels.  Larry was looking for her.  She sighed; she did not know why.  She thought of the old Mendelssohn open-air part-song: