“You are right.  Certainly I will come, and gladly.”

Irene nodded, smiled approval, and moved past him.

In his room he walked hither and thither aimlessly, still holding his hat and stick.  A throbbing of the heart, a quickening of the senses, seemed to give him a new consciousness of life.  His mood of five minutes ago had completely vanished.  He remembered his dreary ramble about the lanes as if it had taken place last week.  Miss Derwent was still speaking to him; his mind echoed again and again every word she had said, perfectly reproducing her voice, her intonation; he saw her bright, beautiful face, its changing lights, its infinite subtleties of expression.  The arch of her eyebrows and the lovely hazel eyes beneath; the small and exquisitely shaped mouth; the little chin, so delicately round and firm; all were engraved on his memory, once and for ever.

He sat down and was lost in a dream.  His arms hung idly; all his muscles were relaxed.  His eyes dwelt on a point of the carpet which he did not see.

Then, with a sudden start of activity, he went to the looking-glass and surveyed himself.  His tie was the worse for wear.  He exchanged it for another.  He brushed his hair violently, and smoothed his moustache.  Never had he felt such dissatisfaction with his appearance.  Never had it struck him so disagreeably before that he was hard-featured, sallow, anything but a handsome man.  Yet, he had good teeth, very white and regular; that was something, perhaps.  Observing them, he grinned at himself grotesquely—­and at once was so disgusted that he turned with a shudder away.

Ordinarily, he would have awaited the summons of the bell for tea.  But, after making himself ready, he gazed from the window and saw Miss Derwent walking alone in the garden; he hastened down.

She gave him a look of intelligence, but took his arrival as a matter of course, and spoke to him about a flowering shrub which pleased her.  Otway’s heart sank.  What had he expected?  He neither knew nor asked himself; he stood beside her, seeing nothing, hearing only a voice and wishing it would speak on for ever.  He was no longer a reflecting, reasoning young man, with a tolerably firm will and fixed purposes, but a mere embodied emotion, and that of the vaguest, swaying in dependence on another’s personality.

Olga Hannaford joined them.  Olga, for all the various charms of her face, had never thus affected him.  But then, he had known her a few years ago, when, as something between child and woman, she had little power to interest an imaginative boy, whose ideal was some actress seen only in a photograph, or some great lady on her travels glimpsed as he strayed about Geneva.  She, in turn, regarded him with the coolest friendliness, her own imagination busy with far other figures than that of a would-be Government clerk.