The footman who was valeting him had pulled up the blind and drawn aside the curtains, and the garden came to him, not as on last evening, weighed with its canopy of stars, but now asserting its own happiness and colour and freshness.
The man said: "The bathroom is the last door down the passage on your right, sir. Breakfast is at half-past nine. It has just gone eight. What clothes, sir?"
Roddy stared at him and smiled. After a little time, the man enquired again: "Which suit will you wear this morning, sir?"
"Dark blue." Roddy, still happily floating somewhere near the ceiling—floating with delicious lightness—"Dark blue—Dark blue—Dark blue——"
For a little while the man, a strange vague shape, pulled out drawers and closed them and walked about the floor, like Agag, delicately. Roddy, from the ceiling watched him and resented the fact that every sharp click of a drawer pulled him nearer to the carpet.
The man's final shutting of the bedroom door plumped Roddy into his bed, wide awake.
"Damn him! What a wonderful day!"
He lay back and watched how waves of light danced on the walls. A fountain splashed in the gardens and the long mirror on the right of the bed had in it the corner of the green lawn and the cool grey stones of an old wall.
Roddy lay on his back and allowed his sensations to run up and down his body. It was for moments such as this that his life was intended. He lived, deliberately and without any selfishness in the matter, for the emotions that the good old god Pan might choose to provide for him.
He did not know Pan by name except as a silly fancy dress that Monty Carfax had once worn at a fancy-dress dance and as Someone alluded to every now and again, vaguely, in the papers, but even though he did not call him by name he, nevertheless, paid, without question, his daily homage.