Ishmael thought it over.  “Yes,” he admitted.  “I can remember whole tracks of thought like that in my childhood, but I think I recognised the danger and made myself alter.”

“I’m sure you didn’t suffer from it,” declared Boase.  “I knew you very thoroughly, Ishmael, and you were reserved and inarticulate; you never acted for effect.”  He felt startled, as though a sudden gap had yawned in the dear past; it did not seem to him possible, or only as the grotesque possibility of a nightmare, that the boy Ishmael should have held tendencies, trends of thought, which he had not realised....

Later came a message from Nicky that he would like Miss Parminter to come up and say good-night to him.  They all laughed at the masculine tactics adopted thus early, but Judith went upstairs.

Later, when the others were thinking of going, Ishmael went up for her.  She was kneeling by the bed, a dark figure in the dim room.  Nicky was asleep, one arm still flung round her shoulder:  she held hers lightly across him; her head was bowed upon the sheet.  Ishmael hesitated a moment, struck by something of abandon in her pose.  Then he touched her lightly on the shoulder.  She started and looked up.

“Oh, it’s you!” she said, peering at him through the darkness.  “How you startled me!”

“The others are going,” said Ishmael.  “It’s been good of you to stay up here.  How long’s the little chap been asleep?”

“Oh, ages!  He’s so sweet, I couldn’t go downstairs to the lamp and all of them somehow.  So small and soft....  You are lucky, Ishmael.”

“Am I?” said he, rather taken aback.  “I hadn’t thought of myself in that light.  But I know what you mean ... about Nicky.”

They left the room together, but Judy cloaked herself in the passage and would not go again into the brightly-lit room.  The Parson and Killigrew saw the two girls home, but Georgie and Boase reached the cottage first, and Georgie fell asleep while she was sitting up in bed waiting, scandalised, in spite of her modernity, for the return of Judith.

Nicky, sleeping peacefully in his little bed, had much to answer for that day.  He had shown the startled Ishmael the gap that lies between two generations, whatever the tie of blood and affection; he had shown him too, by his anger at being torn out of it, that he could still have a mood of clamour for some thrill almost forgotten, some ecstasy he had thought dead ... and he had sent Judy, trembling, eager, as not for many months past, to the arms of the lover who could be so careless of her, but whom, when she chose, she could still stir to a degree no other woman had ever quite attained.

CHAPTER IX

JUDITH’S WHITE NIGHT

When Judith came in during the young dark hours of that morning, she could not sleep, and for a time she busied herself trying to remove the creases and dew-stains from her gown.  Then she sat long by the window before she went to bed and laid the head that a few hours ago had known a sweet-smelling bracken pillow against the linen that could not cool her burning cheek.