I shall go to London, and my old landlady, Mrs Inger, 17 Coburg Square, will either give me a room or will find one for me.

Be sure your sins will find you out, especially if you’re married and her name’s Bertha—

There was not a word about herself, or to her. Connie resented this. He might have said some few words of consolation or reassurance. But she knew he was leaving her free, free to go back to Wragby and to Clifford. She resented that too. He need riot be so falsely chivalrous. She wished he had said to Clifford: ‘Yes, she is my lover and my mistress and I am proud of it!’ But his courage wouldn’t carry him so far.

So her name was coupled with his in Tevershall! It was a mess. But that would soon die down.

She was angry, with the complicated and confused anger that made her inert. She did not know what to do nor what to say, so she said and did nothing. She went on at Venice just the same, rowing out in the gondola with Duncan Forbes, bathing, letting the days slip by. Duncan, who had been rather depressingly in love with her ten years ago, was in love with her again. But she said to him: ‘I only want one thing of men, and that is, that they should leave me alone.’

So Duncan left her alone: really quite pleased to be able to. All the same, he offered her a soft stream of a queer, inverted sort of love. He wanted to be WITH her.

‘Have you ever thought,’ he said to her one day, ‘how very little people are connected with one another. Look at Daniele! He is handsome as a son of the sun. But see how alone he looks in his handsomeness. Yet I bet he has a wife and family, and couldn’t possibly go away from them.’

‘Ask him,’ said Connie.

Duncan did so. Daniele said he was married, and had two children, both male, aged seven and nine. But he betrayed no emotion over the fact.

‘Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe,’ said Connie. ‘The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass, like Giovanni.’ ‘And,’ she thought to herself, ‘like you, Duncan.’

She had to make up her mind what to do. She would leave Venice on the Saturday that he was leaving Wragby: in six days’ time. This would bring her to London on the Monday following, and she would then see him. She wrote to him to the London address, asking him to send her a letter to Hartland’s hotel, and to call for her on the Monday evening at seven.

Inside herself she was curiously and complicatedly angry, and all her responses were numb. She refused to confide even in Hilda, and Hilda, offended by her steady silence, had become rather intimate with a Dutch woman. Connie hated these rather stifling intimacies between women, intimacy into which Hilda always entered ponderously.

Sir Malcolm decided to travel with Connie, and Duncan could come on with Hilda. The old artist always did himself well: he took berths on the Orient Express, in spite of Connie’s dislike of TRAINS DE LUXE, the atmosphere of vulgar depravity there is aboard them nowadays. However, it would make the journey to Paris shorter.