“’Straordinarily peaceful,” murmured Greatorex. “Suppose we ought to be joining the others?”
“Yes, I suppose we ought,” Fell agreed tamely. What else was there to do? He could not go down to the village of Long Orton now, and beseech Phyllis to come out and walk with him by the lake. And without her, all the glory of this amazing night was wasted.
Nor was the full promise of the night yet revealed to him; for it was not until with a reluctant sigh he had turned to follow Greatorex back to the nearly invisible group under the cedar, that he saw the Hunter’s moon, a great disc of ruddy copper, resting as it seemed on the very edge of the eastern horizon.
He lingered, gazing, for a few seconds, half resolved even now to escape the banalities of polite conversation on the lawn and go up to the village. This was such a rare night for the silences of love; serene, brooding and mystical. Yet the automaton in him, the formalised, cultured habit of the Civil Servant, moved him relentlessly back towards the decencies of polite society and the patronage of Lady Ulrica More.
As he silently approached the group on the lawn he heard the clear, musical voice of Leslie Vernon.
“At least you might let one state a case, Harrison,” he was saying.
2
They had already passed the stage of skirmishing for position, when Greatorex rejoined them. Something had apparently happened to Harrison since he came out into the garden. He had lost that effect of impatience which had underlain all his talk of Russia, when, as though afraid of silence, he had been talking, a trifle desperately, against some latent opposition.
Now, comfortably relaxed in the depth of a well-designed basket chair, and little more of him visible than the gleam of his shirt front, the pale blur of his face and the occasional glow of his cigarette end, he had an air of being tolerantly complacent. It seemed that he was willing to listen, however condescendingly, to Vernon’s attack.
“Look here, Harrison,” Vernon had begun. “Why won’t you talk this out?”