someone cried.
She gripped Denis's hand tighter, and did not stir.
"Where's Chrissie?"
"Fallen over the cliff, perhaps. I thought I heard a splash."
"No, she's had an idea and rushed away to put it on paper."
"Gone for a moonlight bathe."
"Who with?"
"Why not by herself? We're not all like you, Coral, trotting about with boy-friends all the time."
"Damn it, I think someone ought to find Chrissie," objected a voice—masculine, and not entirely sober. "She's our hostess, after all. Why, she may be drowned for all we know."
"She was here when we arrived. I saw her."
"I shall have to go in a minute," Chrissie said, speaking low and quickly. "Tell me—how long are you staying at the Hôtel d'Azur?"
"I don't know—about a fortnight or three weeks, I expect. I'm with a Mr. Bolham—" Denis gulped. "I—I'm his temporary secretary, you know."
He minded saying it. He would have liked to pretend that he was staying at the Hôtel d'Azur independently, for a holiday. But Chrissie did not seem to notice the admission of his subordinate position.
"Do you have a certain amount of free time—in the afternoons, for instance, or after dinner?"
"I can usually get off in the afternoons. He works in the mornings, and sometimes between tea and dinner. I could get most of my stuff done in the evenings, if I wanted to."
"If you don't mind the heat——"
"I love it," put in Denis eagerly.
"—Then come down here—no, you haven't got a car. I'll pick you up at the bottom of the Hôtel d'Azur drive, at two o'clock to-morrow. Bring your bathing-things. We'll go to a place I know along the coast. There's never anybody there. We can talk."
"Chrissie, how wonderful! Do you really mean that you want to talk to me?"
Her great dark eyes looking full at him, she answered softly and deliberately:
"Much more than I want anything else in the world."
His head was reeling. It couldn't really be true—presently he would wake up, and life would be what it had always been—a nerve-racking, anxious, unsatisfying affair, shot through with continual shafts of fear—the fear of poverty, of failure, of disgrace—above all, the continual fear of being found out in one way or another.
"Denis, are you happier than when you came here to-night?"
He drew a long breath.
"Oh, my dear. It's like being in another world altogether. Everything's changed."
They looked at one another with enchanted eyes. In hers Denis saw the reflection of his own newborn sincerity. A glowing exaltation seemed to envelop him, persisting all through the riotous hour that followed, when he and Chrissie Challoner were drawn into the vortex of noisy talk and laughter that raged up and down the little dark garden and the stone pavilion.
Angie Moon, dancing languorously with Buckland to the strains of the cheap and raucous gramophone, Coral Romayne screaming gynæcological confidences at Mrs. Wolverton-Gush, Hilary withdrawn in sulky superiority behind the pages of a French novel, other people unknown to him, talking interminably to Chrissie about literary scandals and rumours of scandals—Denis saw and heard them through a haze.
For the first time in his life, he was utterly happy.
(3)
It was one o'clock in the morning when the Buick stopped in front of the Hôtel d'Azur. A single light was burning in the hall, over the desk of the concierge. Madame, sallow-faced and with eyelids puffy from fatigue, sat there making entries in her ledgers. She raised her head and smiled at the noisy entry of Coral Romayne and the Moons, but there was a gleam of hatred in her black eyes.
"Vous avez passé une bonne soirée, messieurs-dames?" she said in an amiable voice, and glanced meaningly up at the clock. "Tout le monde est couché depuis longtemps."
No one answered. Angie said: "I don't know what she's talking about," and walked, with her swaying gait, to the lift.
Buckland was following her, but Mrs. Romayne called out sharply: "It won't take more than two people. It sticks. You can just walk up, Buck."
She went into the tiny lift and slammed the gate. It ascended weakly and jerkily, bearing her and Angie Moon out of sight.
"No hope of a drink, I suppose," grumbled Hilary. He had had a disappointing evening, no one had taken any particular notice of him, and Chrissie Challoner, after all, wasn't his type at all. He suspected her of being a Lesbian, as he did all intelligent women to whom his own masculinity obviously made no immediate appeal. Sulkily he went upstairs.
Denis found himself in his own room, on the third floor, without the slightest recollection of how he had got there. In a trance, he undressed himself, and switched off the light. Then he knelt down by the bedside, as he did every night of his life, and hid his face in his hands. Happiness surged over him, until he felt as though his spirit must drown in bliss.
Chrissie ...
Incoherent words of thankfulness formed themselves on his lips—he was praying half aloud.
Denis's belief in a personal God had grown up with him. Often and often it had been his only defence against despair, and self-condemnation, and the overwhelming inward certainty of his own inability ever to rise above circumstances. He clung ardently to his conviction that God understood him, and would help him when things became unendurable, and not allow him to remain for ever unfriended, and lonely, and obscure. This faith in God was on a par with Denis's secret dramatisation of himself as a reincarnated soul, sent to help others less evolved. He had neither the mentality nor the temperament that analyses before accepting, and his passionate adherence to a God who cared profoundly and individually for Denis Hannaford Waller was in proportion to his supreme need of reassurance, his deadly and corroding fear of being somehow inferior to the rest of humanity.
It was still natural to Denis, as natural as it had been in childhood, to translate his emotions into terms of prayer. He knelt for a long time by the side of the bed, unconscious of the slightly absurd conjunction of this traditional attitude of supplication with his neat, blue-striped pyjama suit, his carefully brushed little narrow head clasped in his long, skinny fingers, and the upturned soles of his slipperless feet.
When at last he climbed into bed, it was heaven to lie in the stillness, the window wide open to the breathless, starlit night, and relive, over and over again, every instant of the evening spent with Chrissie Challoner. He could remember everything that she had said, and that he had answered, and every intonation of her softly spoken phrases. He could feel again the close, steady pressure of her small hand as they said good-night.
He did not allow himself fully to realise that he had fallen violently in love. He thought of the strong compulsion that had drawn Chrissie
