And he hovered a moment on tip-toe, taller even than nature had made him, looking down at Antonia with a wry smile; where she lay dreamily back in her chair, with hands clasped behind the beautiful, delicate shape of her head. Then he bent, and took that head between his long, thin, brown fingers, as though she were a holy saint, and reverently touched her forehead with his lips, and put her from him, and swung out of the studio.
Deb understood that it was a kiss of renunciation. And that his passion for Antonia was very real and very hopeless....
Did Antonia know of it?
Antonia telephoned early the next morning to make amused enquiry how much of her inmost soul Deb had been lured to commit to Kennedy’s precarious keeping during the homeward walk.
Deb faltered an evasive reply, ashamed to confess that she had inexplicably delivered up to this persuasive highwayman of secrets the complete comedy and tragedy of the Chorus.
“Did he say anything about me?” Antonia questioned her further.
Again Deb faltered an evasive reply ... whilst in her ears rang a guilty echo of Cliffe’s peroration to the bizarre history of Charlotte Verity’s bold infatuation for a now defunct Arctic explorer who was Cliffe’s own father (“twenty-nine years ago. And all this time neither she nor I have dared to tell Antonia that she’s my own half-sister and a child of love.”...)
“No, nothing, Antonia.”