It was the first I’d heard of any visitors, for I’d come down rather late that morning. I hadn’t slept as well as I usually do. Outside the window of my little sloping-ceilinged cottage bedroom the water, at high tide, had seemed to make rather more noise than its usual soft lap-lapping against the rocks. And then the moon, rising like a big round primrose-coloured Chinese lantern in the star-sprinkled purple sky over the Rivals on the other side of the Menai Straits, had poured a flood of white radiance straight upon my bed, and I hadn’t bothered to get up and pull down the yellow linen blind to shut it out. I had wanted to feel the sea-scented night-breeze across my face. So I had lain there, tossing a little between the snowy rough country sheets, watching the square of light creeping inch by inch up the wall, and thinking idly of all sorts of irrelevant things....
Of Cicely in Marconi Mansions....
Of “Smithie” at the office, and her boy. They didn’t prove much truth in the theory that people fall more deeply in love in the country. I saw again that crossing at the Bank, with the big motor-buses skidding across the muddy road like beginners on skates; and there, in the middle of the fog and the petrol-reek and the jostling luncheon-hour crowds, those two anæmic, City-fied young faces shone as radiantly as if the lovers walked the loneliest Eden that ever was....
Of a school-friend of my own, now very happily married, who had said to me, long ago: “An engagement, Monica, is such a skimpy time! It’s made up of nothing but good-byes and good nights to the person you most want to be always with!”
And of the difference between that sort of engagement and the “arrangement” between myself and Billy Waters, which has converted itself into such an entirely satisfactory and amusing friendship....
The result was that I’d dropped off to sleep again after Blodwen’s bang on my bedroom door, and that I’d been the last down at breakfast.
“Who’s this that’s coming, Billy?” I asked. “Your Uncle Albert again?”
“No, thank—I mean, no, not him,” said Billy. “Some French people you haven’t met yet. They’re touring North Wales in their car. He’s a man I’ve had a good deal to do with in business.”
“And she——” began Theo, stopping uncharacteristically short as her brother went on, tapping a letter he held.