For this, she told herself somewhat dizzily, was what it came to—­the summing-up toward which her conscientious efforts at self-collection had been gradually pushing her:  with all this in reach, Guy Dawnish was leaving Wentworth reluctantly.

“I was a bit lonely here at first—­but now!” And again:  “It will be jolly, of course, to see them all again—­but there are some things one doesn’t easily give up. . . .”

If he had known only Wentworth, it would have been wonderful enough that he should have chosen her out of all Wentworth—­but to have known that other life, and to set her in the balance against it—­poor Margaret Ransom, in whom, at the moment, nothing seemed of weight but her years!  Ah, it might well produce, in nerves and brain, and poor unpractised pulses, a flushed tumult of sensation, the rush of a great wave of life, under which memory struggled in vain to reassert itself, to particularize again just what his last words—­the very last—­had been. . . .

When consciousness emerged, quivering, from this retrospective assault, it pushed Margaret Ransom—­feeling herself a mere leaf in the blast—­toward the writing-table from which her innocent and voluminous correspondence habitually flowed.  She had a letter to write now—­much shorter but more difficult than any she had ever been called on to indite.

“Dear Mr. Dawnish,” she began, “since telephoning you just now I have decided not—­”

Maria’s voice, at the door, announced that tea was in the library:  “And I s’pose it’s the brown silk you’ll wear to the speaking?”

In the usual order of the Ransom existence, its mistress’s toilet was performed unassisted; and the mere enquiry—­at once friendly and deferential—­projected, for Margaret, a strong light on the importance of the occasion.  That she should answer:  “But I am not going,” when the going was so manifestly part of a household solemnity about which the thoughts below stairs fluttered in proud participation; that in face of such participation she should utter a word implying indifference or hesitation—­nay, revealing herself the transposed, uprooted thing she had been on the verge of becoming; to do this was—­well! infinitely harder than to perform the alternative act of tearing up the sheet of note-paper under her reluctant pen.

Yes, she said, she would wear the brown silk. . . .

III

ALL the heat and glare from the long illuminated table, about which the fumes of many courses still hung in a savoury fog, seemed to surge up to the ladies’ gallery, and concentrate themselves in the burning cheeks of a slender figure withdrawn behind the projection of a pillar.

It never occurred to Margaret Ransom that she was sitting in the shade.  She supposed that the full light of the chandeliers was beating on her face—­and there were moments when it seemed as though all the heads about the great horse-shoe below, bald, shaggy, sleek, close-thatched, or thinly latticed, were equipped with an additional pair of eyes, set at an angle which enabled them to rake her face as relentlessly as the electric burners.