emphatic statement that “she wanted to care.”  Only her imagining that their old relations could go on showed him how far she was from knowing what “to care” meant.  At first without knowing it, but with a gradually increasing keenness of consciousness, he had become aware that this sisterly attitude of hers towards him had meant so infinitely much, because he had taken it to be the prelude to something more.  Now he saw that it was, so to speak, a piece complete in itself.  It bore no relation to what he had imagined it would lead into.  No curtain went up when the prelude was over; the curtain remained inexorably hanging there, not acknowledging the prelude at all.  Not for a moment did he accuse her of encouraging him to have thought so; she had but given him a frankness of comradeship that meant to her exactly what it expressed.  But he had thought otherwise; he had imagined that it would grow towards a culmination.  All that (and here was the change that made his mind blank and unfeeling) had to be cut away, and with it all the budding branches that his imagination had pictured as springing from it.  He could not be comrade to her as he was to her brother—­the inexorable demands of sex forbade it.

He went briskly enough through the clean, dry streets.  The frost of last night had held throughout the morning, and the sunlight sparkled with a rare and seasonable brightness of a traditional Christmas weather.  Hecatombs of turkeys hung in the poulterers’ windows, among sprigs of holly, and shops were bright with children’s toys.  The briskness of the day had flushed the colour into the faces of the passengers in the street, and the festive air of the imminent holiday was abroad.  All this Michael noticed with a sense of detachment; what had happened had caused a veil to fall between himself and external things; it was as if he was sealed into some glass cage, and had no contact with what passed round him.  This lasted throughout his walk, and when he let himself into his flat it was with the same sense of alienation that he found his cousin Francis gracefully reclining on the sofa that he had pulled up in front of the fire.

Francis was inclined to be querulous.

“I was just wondering whether I should give you up,” he said.  “The hour that you named for lunch was half-past one.  And I have almost forgotten what your clock sounded like when it struck two.”

This also seemed to matter very little.

“Did I ask you to lunch?” he said.  “I really quite forgot; I can’t even remember doing it now.”

“But there will be lunch?” asked Francis rather anxiously.

“Of course.  It’ll be ready in ten minutes.”

Michael came and stood in front of the fire, and looked with a sudden spasm of envy on the handsome boy who lay there.  If he himself had been anything like that

—­“I was distinctly chippy this morning,” remarked Francis, “and so I didn’t so much mind waiting for lunch.  I attribute it to too much beer and bacon last night at your friend’s house.  I enjoyed it—­I mean the evening, and for that matter the bacon—­at the time.  It really was extremely pleasant.”