His eyes were dazed, his hands very cold, and his brain excited and yet half asleep.  Inside the door everything was as he had left it except that the hall was now empty.  There were the chairs turning in towards each other where people had sat talking, and the empty glasses on little tables, and the newspapers scattered on the floor.  As he shut the door he felt as if he were enclosed in a square box, and instantly shrivelled up.  It was all very bright and very small.  He stopped for a minute by the long table to find a paper which he had meant to read, but he was still too much under the influence of the dark and the fresh air to consider carefully which paper it was or where he had seen it.

As he fumbled vaguely among the papers he saw a figure cross the tail of his eye, coming downstairs.  He heard the swishing sound of skirts, and to his great surprise, Evelyn M. came up to him, laid her hand on the table as if to prevent him from taking up a paper, and said: 

“You’re just the person I wanted to talk to.”  Her voice was a little unpleasant and metallic, her eyes were very bright, and she kept them fixed upon him.

“To talk to me?” he repeated.  “But I’m half asleep.”

“But I think you understand better than most people,” she answered, and sat down on a little chair placed beside a big leather chair so that Hewet had to sit down beside her.

“Well?” he said.  He yawned openly, and lit a cigarette.  He could not believe that this was really happening to him.  “What is it?”

“Are you really sympathetic, or is it just a pose?” she demanded.

“It’s for you to say,” he replied.  “I’m interested, I think.”  He still felt numb all over and as if she was much too close to him.

“Any one can be interested!” she cried impatiently.  “Your friend Mr. Hirst’s interested, I daresay however, I do believe in you.  You look as if you’d got a nice sister, somehow.”  She paused, picking at some sequins on her knees, and then, as if she had made up her mind, she started off, “Anyhow, I’m going to ask your advice.  D’you ever get into a state where you don’t know your own mind?  That’s the state I’m in now.  You see, last night at the dance Raymond Oliver,—­he’s the tall dark boy who looks as if he had Indian blood in him, but he says he’s not really,—­well, we were sitting out together, and he told me all about himself, how unhappy he is at home, and how he hates being out here.  They’ve put him into some beastly mining business.  He says it’s beastly—­I should like it, I know, but that’s neither here nor there.  And I felt awfully sorry for him, one couldn’t help being sorry for him, and when he asked me to let him kiss me, I did.  I don’t see any harm in that, do you?  And then this morning he said he’d thought I meant something more, and I wasn’t the sort to let any one kiss me.  And we talked and talked.  I daresay I was very silly, but one can’t help liking people when one’s sorry for them.  I do like him most awfully—­” She paused.  “So I gave him half a promise, and then, you see, there’s Alfred Perrott.”