Again I had the sense of a door closing, of time passing and not to be called back. It will never be the same again, never in all our lives, I said to myself, and a sense of complete desolation came over me. It seemed to me then that the best thing in my life had gone irretrievably. We had broken something that could never be mended.
I shivered, and Hugo asked if I was cold.
I said:
‘Yes, a little,’ and we turned back towards the house.
Hugo felt the same as I did, or something like it.
I knew that, and he knew that I knew, but we could not speak of what we felt. For the first time in our lives we had something to hide.
We turned back towards the house, through the Jasmine Gate, and past the rose garden. Francis, the cat, ran silently across the lawn in front of us. Two people were walking about by the statues at the end of the path. I think they were Anthony Cowper and Mary Lacey, but they did not matter. The light streamed out from the windows of the drawing-room, and in a great shaft from the open garden door. The music was stopping again as we reached it, and more couples came out, laughing, and some wiping their faces, for the night was still very warm. Hugo and I went in. We did not dance together again that evening, and the light had gone out for me.
I did not know what I had done, but I felt miserable, and somehow oddly ashamed.
The next day both Hugo and I went back to school.
We did not meet again till the end of the summer, for that August Guy and Hugo went abroad, to France and Italy.