“Are you in love?” asked Hirst.  He put in his eyeglass.

“Don’t be a fool,” said Hewet.

“Well, I’ll sit down and think about it,” said Hirst.  “One really ought to.  If these people would only think about things, the world would be a far better place for us all to live in.  Are you trying to think?”

That was exactly what Hewet had been doing for the last half-hour, but he did not find Hirst sympathetic at the moment.

“I shall go for a walk,” he said.

“Remember we weren’t in bed last night,” said Hirst with a prodigious yawn.

Hewet rose and stretched himself.

“I want to go and get a breath of air,” he said.

An unusual feeling had been bothering him all the evening and forbidding him to settle into any one train of thought.  It was precisely as if he had been in the middle of a talk which interested him profoundly when some one came up and interrupted him.  He could not finish the talk, and the longer he sat there the more he wanted to finish it.  As the talk that had been interrupted was a talk with Rachel, he had to ask himself why he felt this, and why he wanted to go on talking to her.  Hirst would merely say that he was in love with her.  But he was not in love with her.  Did love begin in that way, with the wish to go on talking?  No.  It always began in his case with definite physical sensations, and these were now absent, he did not even find her physically attractive.  There was something, of course, unusual about her—­she was young, inexperienced, and inquisitive, they had been more open with each other than was usually possible.  He always found girls interesting to talk to, and surely these were good reasons why he should wish to go on talking to her; and last night, what with the crowd and the confusion, he had only been able to begin to talk to her.  What was she doing now?  Lying on a sofa and looking at the ceiling, perhaps.  He could imagine her doing that, and Helen in an arm-chair, with her hands on the arm of it, so—­looking ahead of her, with her great big eyes—­oh no, they’d be talking, of course, about the dance.  But suppose Rachel was going away in a day or two, suppose this was the end of her visit, and her father had arrived in one of the steamers anchored in the bay,—­it was intolerable to know so little.  Therefore he exclaimed, “How d’you know what you feel, Hirst?” to stop himself from thinking.

But Hirst did not help him, and the other people with their aimless movements and their unknown lives were disturbing, so that he longed for the empty darkness.  The first thing he looked for when he stepped out of the hall door was the light of the Ambroses’ villa.  When he had definitely decided that a certain light apart from the others higher up the hill was their light, he was considerably reassured.  There seemed to be at once a little stability in all this incoherence.  Without any definite plan in his head, he took the turning to the right and walked