But she could not avoid the subject.  Here was a new-comer to Rackham Park.  She could not bear that he should carry away a wrong impression of her darling.

“I’ll tell you the truth about Joan.  She has lived her sheltered life with us, and no real things have yet come near her.  No real troubles, no deep joys.  Her parents even died when she was too young to know them.  But she is eighteen and alive to her finger-tips.  Therefore she’s—­expectant.”

“Yes,” Hillyard agreed.

“She is searching for the meaning, for the secrets of life, sure that there is a meaning, sure that there are secrets, if only she could get hold of them.  But she hasn’t got hold of them.  She runs here.  She runs there.  She explores, she experiments.  That’s why she’s dressed like a tramp and thinking out a book where the heroine gets married to the Funeral March of a Marionette.  Oh, my dear person, it just means, as it always means with us poor creatures, that the right man hasn’t come along.”

Millie Splay leaned back in her seat.

“When he does!” she cried.  “When he does!  Did you see the magnolia this morning?  It burst into flower during the night.  Joan!  I thought once that it might be Harold Jupp.  But it isn’t.”

Lady Splay spoke with discouragement.  She had the matchmaking fever in her blood.  Martin Hillyard remembered her glance when he had casually spoken of Harry Luttrell.  Then she startled him with words which he was never to forget, and in which he chose to find a real profundity.

“The right man has not come along.  So Joan mistakes anything odd for something great, and thinks that to be unusual is to be strong.  It’s a mood of young people who have not yet waked up.”

They drove to the private stand and walked through into the paddock.  Millie Splay looked round at the gay and brilliant throng.  She sighed.

“There she is, moping in the drawing-room over Prince Hohenstiel—­whatever his name is.  She won’t come to Goodwood.  No, she just won’t.”

Yet Joan Whitworth did come to Goodwood that year, though not upon this day.

No one in that household had read the newspapers so carefully each day as Martin Hillyard.  As the prospect darkened each morning, he was in a distress lest a letter should not have been forwarded from his flat in London, or should have been lost in the post.  Each evening when the party returned from the races his first question asked whether there was no telegram awaiting him.  So regular and urgent were his inquiries that the house-party could not be ignorant of his preoccupation.  And on the afternoon of the Thursday a telegram in its orange envelope was lying upon the hall-table.

“It’s for you, Mr. Hillyard,” said Lady Splay.

Hillyard held it in his hands.  So the summons had come, the summons hoped for, despaired of, made so often into a whip wherewith he lashed his arrogance, the summons to serve.