He sat, facing the sunset, immaculate as ever but unusually silent. Every now and then, it seemed to her as though his eyes saw—beyond the rose glow of the horizon—into vision-land. “He’s thinking about that girl,” she reasoned, “the girl whose photograph we saw at the flat.” And then, remembering the eyes of a man she had once seen at a revivalist meeting, she began to doubt her theory of a love-affair.
Sunset darkled to twilight, twilight to blackness, as they finished dinner.
Patricia, pleading tiredness, went upstairs early; heard, as she undressed in the cool fragrance of the river-night, the sound of canvas-chairs, dragging first across the gravel, then over grass; saw the points of two cigars burning redly under the willow-trees.
“Beckmann, Coronas,” announced Peter. “Good, aren’t they?”
“Very,” admitted Francis.
For nearly ten minutes, neither spoke. It was a night for confidences. Silent save for the river-chuckle; star-dusted; peaceful. But the two Englishmen smoked on; reticent, each busy with his own dreaming: the one seeing a great business, world-wide, endless in opportunity: the other, vignetted in silver radiance against the sable background of his thought, the features of a girl—of a girl five thousand miles removed from England—a girl for whose sake and without hope of reward he had vowed himself to the dissatisfying god of Work.
“Why don’t you get married again?” asked Peter suddenly.
“Only because I can’t afford it,” lied Francis Gordon.
§ 6
Violet Rawlings, sprightly as ever, even more fluffily dressed than usual; and her husband Hubert, determined that ninety-six hours of personal suggestion should at last secure him some part of the Nirvana advertising account, arrived in time for lunch next day. The foxy-faced publicity agent lost no time in opening his campaign.