They listened, Julie seemingly intent, and Peter, who soon gave up the attempt to recognise the piece, glanced sideways at the couple on the lounge. They did not notice him. He took them both in and caught—he could not help it—a few words.
She was thirty-five, he guessed, slightly made-up, but handsome and full figured, a woman of whom any man might have been proud. He was an officer, in Major's uniform, and he was smoking a cigarette impatiently and staring down the lounge. She, on the other hand, had her eyes fixed on him as if to read every expression on his face, which was heavy and sullen and mutinous.
"Is that final, then, George?" she said.
"I tell you I can't help it; I promised I'd dine with Carstairs to-night."
A look swept across her face. Peter could not altogether read it. It was not merely anger, or pique, or disappointment; it certainly was not merely grief. There was all that in it, but there was more. And she said—he only just caught the sentence of any of their words, but there was the world of bitter meaning in it:
"Quite alone, I suppose? And there will be no necessity for me to sit up?"
"Peter," said Julie suddenly, "the tea's cold. Take me upstairs, will you? we can have better sent up."
He turned to her in surprise, and then saw that she too had heard and seen.
"Right, dear," he said, "It is beastly stuff. I think, after all, I'd prefer a spot, and I believe you would too."
He rose carefully, not looking towards the lounge, like a man; and Julie got up too, glancing at that other couple with such an ordinary merely interested look that Peter smiled to himself to see it. They threaded their way in necessary silence through the tables and chairs to the doors, and said hardly a word in the lift. But in their sitting-room, cosy as ever, Julie turned to him in a passion of emotion such as he had scarcely dreamed could exist even in her.