“Because Ordith stays?”
“Partly—though I think she has cast off Ordith and the thought of him.... But she’ll be glad to be rid of the place and its associations. London will give her something else to think about.”
“It’s almost incredible,” John said slowly, “that anyone out here now should be able to reach London within seventeen days. It seems further away than that.”
“But I like the East,” Hugh protested.
John laughed. “Good God!” he exclaimed, “so do I; but that has nothing to do with it.” He knocked out his pipe against the verandah rails. “Anyhow,” he said, “it’s a long lie-in to-morrow. Throw us a cigarette, Hugh.”
He looked out across the lawn, across the broad belt of trees that stood between the garden and the beach. The sea was near—not that sea into which steel ships vomited their bilge, but the quiet sea of kissing sands and straight horizon which had been his first love. To-morrow did not matter; that darkness, those stars unsnared by sextants, that sea undivided into ranges, were suggestive of too many to-morrows, too many yesterdays. From an open window came voices and laughter, and the tinkle of a curtain being drawn.
“Women,” Hugh said.
John leaned over the rail.
“That curtain has cut a patch of light out of the lawn. They’ll all go out one by one.”