“It’s a very difficult one,” said her aunt.  “Perhaps you will help me shuffle?”

Ann Veronica did, and also assisted nimbly with the arrangements of the rows of eight with which the struggle began.  Then she sat watching the play, sometimes offering a helpful suggestion, sometimes letting her attention wander to the smoothly shining arms she had folded across her knees just below the edge of the table.  She was feeling extraordinarily well that night, so that the sense of her body was a deep delight, a realization of a gentle warmth and strength and elastic firmness.  Then she glanced at the cards again, over which her aunt’s many-ringed hand played, and then at the rather weak, rather plump face that surveyed its operations.

It came to Ann Veronica that life was wonderful beyond measure.  It seemed incredible that she and her aunt were, indeed, creatures of the same blood, only by a birth or so different beings, and part of that same broad interlacing stream of human life that has invented the fauns and nymphs, Astarte, Aphrodite, Freya, and all the twining beauty of the gods.  The love-songs of all the ages were singing in her blood, the scent of night stock from the garden filled the air, and the moths that beat upon the closed frames of the window next the lamp set her mind dreaming of kisses in the dusk.  Yet her aunt, with a ringed hand flitting to her lips and a puzzled, worried look in her eyes, deaf to all this riot of warmth and flitting desire, was playing Patience—­playing Patience, as if Dionysius and her curate had died together.  A faint buzz above the ceiling witnessed that petrography, too, was active.  Gray and tranquil world!  Amazing, passionless world!  A world in which days without meaning, days in which “we don’t want things to happen” followed days without meaning—­until the last thing happened, the ultimate, unavoidable, coarse, “disagreeable.”  It was her last evening in that wrappered life against which she had rebelled.  Warm reality was now so near her she could hear it beating in her ears.  Away in London even now Capes was packing and preparing; Capes, the magic man whose touch turned one to trembling fire.  What was he doing?  What was he thinking?  It was less than a day now, less than twenty hours.  Seventeen hours, sixteen hours.  She glanced at the soft-ticking clock with the exposed brass pendulum upon the white marble mantel, and made a rapid calculation.  To be exact, it was just sixteen hours and twenty minutes.  The slow stars circled on to the moment of their meeting.  The softly glittering summer stars!  She saw them shining over mountains of snow, over valleys of haze and warm darkness....  There would be no moon.

“I believe after all it’s coming out!” said Miss Stanley.  “The aces made it easy.”

Ann Veronica started from her reverie, sat up in her chair, became attentive.  “Look, dear,” she said presently, “you can put the ten on the Jack.”

CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH