So motionless sat Ferlie during the next two hours that an artist, thus minded, could have made a detailed portrait of her before the train sighed gustily up Victoria platform.
Rain, in the evening air, and black and gold puddles reflecting the passing figures.
She made her way along to the cloak-room and deposited the box which did duty for a week-end of light dresses, but her suit-case went with her into the taxi. The man received indifferently her stammering request to be taken to the Jermyn Street address.
Inside the taxi it was hot and steamy. The last occupant had mingled scent and cigarettes. Ferlie dropped both windows and allowed the rush of cool damp air from the flickering streets to whirl her hair about her face. She passed a chamois leather over her eyelids and nose, and shrugged impatiently at the reflection the narrow strip of glass gave back to her under a withered spray of lilies-of-the-valley.
She paid the taxi and waited to watch the man drive away, before turning into the bare stone hallway to read the minute directions on the lift. Although a more adventurous spirit than her mother she decided to walk up. Her watch told her that it was a quarter to eight.
* * * * * *
Cyprian had spent most of the time, since a late cup of tea, in writing. He was very busy. This could not be counted as coming home on Leave and he did not expect to have more than six short weeks in England.
Whimsically, he wondered, as the twilight deepened what it was all about—this busy-ness with regard to somebody else's affairs. Since he had chosen to turn his back upon a sheltered and unruffled peace (or would it have been stultification?) and taken the sea-ways towards more glowing suns than ever dawned upon the University towns of England, what Grail had he been pursuing? He had earned his bread and a little butter. For the rest there had remained the distant echoes of a siren's singing, now without power to lure him closer, and Ferlie's gradually maturing letters.
Had he wanted Ferlie to grow up? She had shown precocious signs of it during his last Leave. If he had lost his little companion of the Zoological Gardens England must now become as lonely as Burma. There was the influence of that strange woman who had had tea with them: the aunt. Her name had made him think of hair-oil. Cyprian laid down his pen. In the brightness of the firelight he had not noticed his omission to turn up the electric reading-lamp; and the East ages the eyes. He ought to feel younger than he did. One had to take malaria into account. How old was Ferlie now? Nearly eighteen? Still a child to thirty-nine....
No one had rung him up. He particularly refrained from asking Ferlie to do so in his note, in case she too should be very busy these days. There would be gaieties in town for the Carmichaels' daughter at eighteen, and hordes of young men who did complicated things with their feet in ball-rooms. Young men, so much younger than Cyprian, that they could not have shared his short career as a soldier, early invalided out in the first push.