He stole a look to his left.  Janet, in his eyes, was almost unchanged.  Of course she looked a thought older, a thought thicker—­not so much in her upright figure, as in her clever, irregular-featured face.  In the days of his early manhood she had never seemed to him to be very much older than himself—­but now she looked a lifetime older than he felt.

Only Mr. Tosswill looked absolutely unchanged.  His mild benevolent face, his deep blue eyes, his grey hair, seemed exactly the same as when Radmore had last sat down, in the Old Place dining-room, to a full table.  That had been in the Christmas holidays of 1910.  Very well he remembered all that had happened then, for he and Betty had just become engaged.

At nineteen Betty Tosswill had belonged to the ideal type of old-fashioned English girlhood—­high-spirited, cheerful, artless yet intelligent, with a strong sense of humour.  She had worn a pink evening frock during those long-ago Christmas holidays, and had looked, at any rate in her young lover’s eyes, beautiful.

They had been ardently, passionately in love, he a masterful, exacting lover, and though seeming older than his age, without any of the magnanimity which even the passage of only a very few years brings to most intelligent men.  Poor little Betty of long ago—­what a child she had been at nineteen!—­but a child capable of deep and varied emotions.

At the time of their parting he had been absorbed in his own selfish sensations of anger, revolt, and the sharp sense of loss, savagely glad that she was unhappy too.  But after he had gone, after he had plunged into the new, to him exciting and curious, life of the great vessel taking him to Australia, he had forced himself to put Betty out of his mind, and, after a few days, he had started a violent flirtation with the most attractive woman on board the liner.  The flirtation had developed, by the time they reached Sydney, into a serious affair, and had been the determining cause why he had not written even to George.  Godfrey Radmore had not thought of that woman for years.  But to-night her now hateful, meretricious image rose, with horrid vividness, before him.  It had been an ugly, debasing episode, and had dragged on and on, as such episodes have a way of doing.

Wrenching his mind free of that odious memory, he looked across at Betty.  Yes, it was at once a relief and something of a disappointment to feel her, too, transformed into a stranger.  For one thing she had had, when he had last seen her, a great deal of long fair hair.  But she had cut it off when starting her arduous war work, and the lack of it altered her amazingly, all the more that she did not wear her short hair “bobbed,” in what had become the prevailing fashion, but brushed back from her low forehead, and staidly held in place by a broad, black, snood-like ribbon.

He looked to his right, down the old-fashioned, almost square dining table.  Jack was the least changed, after his father, of the young people sitting at this table.  Jack, nine years ago, had been a rather complacent boy, doing very well at school, the type of boy who is as if marked out by fate to do well in life.  Yes, Jack had hardly changed at all, but Radmore, looking at Jack, felt a sudden intolerable jealousy for George....