“D’you remember the morning after the dance?” he demanded.  “It was here we sat, and you talked nonsense, and Rachel made little heaps of stones.  I, on the other hand, had the whole meaning of life revealed to me in a flash.”  He paused for a second, and drew his lips together in a tight little purse.  “Love,” he said.  “It seems to me to explain everything.  So, on the whole, I’m very glad that you two are going to be married.”  He then turned round abruptly, without looking at them, and walked back to the villa.  He felt both exalted and ashamed of himself for having thus said what he felt.  Probably they were laughing at him, probably they thought him a fool, and, after all, had he really said what he felt?

It was true that they laughed when he was gone; but the dispute about Helen which had become rather sharp, ceased, and they became peaceful and friendly.

Chapter XXIV

They reached the hotel rather early in the afternoon, so that most people were still lying down, or sitting speechless in their bedrooms, and Mrs. Thornbury, although she had asked them to tea, was nowhere to be seen.  They sat down, therefore, in the shady hall, which was almost empty, and full of the light swishing sounds of air going to and fro in a large empty space.  Yes, this arm-chair was the same arm-chair in which Rachel had sat that afternoon when Evelyn came up, and this was the magazine she had been looking at, and this the very picture, a picture of New York by lamplight.  How odd it seemed—­nothing had changed.

By degrees a certain number of people began to come down the stairs and to pass through the hall, and in this dim light their figures possessed a sort of grace and beauty, although they were all unknown people.  Sometimes they went straight through and out into the garden by the swing door, sometimes they stopped for a few minutes and bent over the tables and began turning over the newspapers.  Terence and Rachel sat watching them through their half-closed eyelids—­the Johnsons, the Parkers, the Baileys, the Simmons’, the Lees, the Morleys, the Campbells, the Gardiners.  Some were dressed in white flannels and were carrying racquets under their arms, some were short, some tall, some were only children, and some perhaps were servants, but they all had their standing, their reason for following each other through the hall, their money, their position, whatever it might be.  Terence soon gave up looking at them, for he was tired; and, closing his eyes, he fell half asleep in his chair.  Rachel watched the people for some time longer; she was fascinated by the certainty and the grace of their movements, and by the inevitable way in which they seemed to follow each other, and loiter and pass on and disappear.  But after a time her thoughts wandered, and she began to think of the dance, which had been held in this room, only then the room itself looked quite different.  Glancing round, she could hardly