“No, a saviour.”

* * * * *

She was dressed in pale lilac—­the coolest lilac in the world.  It rippled round her like loving caressing waves.

“What is your dress called, Paula?”

“Oasis,” she said. “‘Indian summer’ would have been a better name.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Why do you always want to know?”

“I am writing a book.”

“Tant pis.”

She was out of temper.

The flowers arrived.

Old-fashioned pink roses, coral carnations, purple stocks, pink pinks, mauve orchids, moss roses, patterned chintz-like phlox.

“Oh!” she said, and for a moment she shut her eyes.

Then: 

“Tell me about her,” she said.

“Marthe?”

“Is that her name?”

“She is vibrant.”

“But of course.  What does she look like?”

“Her hair is like a dirty new coin.  You feel that you could polish it into brightness.  Her eyes are like tea—­yellow camomile tea.  Her mouth is big and rather grave.  There are electric waves of aliveness running all through her.”

“I do not like her.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“All that irrelevant, interfering vitality.  It is dangerous.”

“And slumbering, mysterious magnetism, is that not dangerous?”

“That, too.”

There was a thunderstorm and the air got cool.

Madame Marly had a headache and dined in her room.

* * * * *

The next day was grey—­grey air, a grey sky, a grey countryside, a grey sea—­not luminous, lustrous grey, but opaque chiffon drawn across the world.

Paula’s flowers had arrived—­lemon-coloured hollyhocks, blue and mauve and purple delphiniums, filmy love-in-the-mist, primrose antirrhinums, snowy Madonna lilies with golden middles, huge creamy roses, tiny yellow rosebuds, straggling larkspurs.

She was dressed in a grey whipcord coat and skirt with a grey swathed turban.  She looked distant—­on the brink of disappearance—­not so much as if she were going to travel but as if she were going to vanish.

She regarded the flowers with grave concentration.  It was as if she felt for them a stern passionate devotion.  She took one of the white roses and stroked it—­as if it were a shy mother with her first child.  Then she said: 

“I want to go for a long walk.”

They walked for miles and miles.  The mist sprinkled her hair with dew-drops.  It looked quite white.  Her eyes were deep and brooding and you couldn’t catch them.

“Paula,” Maurice said, “how remote you are.”

“Am I?” she said.  And it made her more remote than ever.

He walked desperately, as if each step were an obstacle painfully overcome.  She walked with a swaying unconscious rhythm, as if she did not know what she was doing.