at moments, vividly recall either.
"Oh, that'll be absolutely wizard!" cried Jess in her high, gay voice. "I don't suppose I shall be here myself much longer, I'm expecting to join up any minute practically—but it'll cheer up poor darling aunt Sophy like anything. She adores soldiers. D'you suppose they'll ever take her for a walk?"
"The Colonel's a terrific walker."
"Gosh!" said Jess thoughtfully. "Fancy a colonel."
She did not elucidate the exact grounds of the passing sensation of awe that had evidently prompted the exclamation.
It might have been the thought of the Colonel's rank, or his probable age, or his walking proclivities.
Lieutenant Banks said:
"The Colonel's the most marvellous man that ever lived," in quite inexpressive tones. Then at last he got up.
"Well, thanks frightfully, Lady Arbell."
"Must you go? Why don't you stay to tea?" Jess asked.
"It's terribly kind of you but I can't. I'm supposed to be back at three o'clock and it's ten minutes past four."
"Come on Sunday then. I expect I'll still be here. You could have a bath if you liked, and then tea, and then supper."
The young man's eyes turned towards Valentine.
She ratified Jessica's invitation.
"Thanks frightfully, Lady Arbell."
"Bring one or two other chaps with you, and we might play games or something," cried Jess.
"Yes, do," Valentine said.
Lieutenant Banks said that this was simply terrific, and absolutely marvellously kind, and completely okay so far as he knew but might he ring up?
Jess picked up aunt Sophy, holding her under her arm so that the puppy's legs all dangled in the air, and conducted Banks to the glass doors and through them.
There they remained, silhouetted against the light, and there they could be heard from time to time in apparently animated discussion punctuated by peals of laughter.
Valentine smiled involuntarily, exhilarated by the spontaneity of the sounds.
She looked at the same time rather apologetically towards her brother who was never in the least exhilarated by the behaviour of very young people, but quite the contrary.
General Levallois, however, was apparently not thinking about Jess and the officer.
He met his sister's eyes meditatively.
"Lonergan," he said. "Wasn't that the name of that feller in Rome?"
"Yes."
"Funny thing, if it should turn out to be the same one."
"It isn't an uncommon name, in Ireland."
"There aren't any uncommon names in Ireland," said the General.
"How did you remember, Reggie? You were in India at the time."
"Mother wrote reams, as she always did. Anyway, I never forget a name. You've never seen or heard of him since, have you?"
"Never," said Valentine.
She smiled.
"It was only a week, you know."
"What was only a week?" demanded Jess from behind her.
"A very silly business," declared the General.
"That happened more than twenty-five years ago," added Valentine gently.
"Mummie! Were you mixed up in it?"
"Yes. I was younger than you are now."
Jess gave her mother an affectionate, amused, incredulous look, before dropping on the floor beside her dog.
"Fancy you being mixed up in any very silly business!" she ejaculated.
Leaving them in the hall Valentine went up the steep, curving staircase with its worn carpet, almost threadbare, to her bedroom, shivering as she moved out of the range of the fire.
The stairs, the large circular-railed landing above and the bedrooms were all unheated, and their temperature seemed lower than that of the wet, mild January afternoon out of doors.
Valentine's room was a large, high one with two big windows that looked over the drive and the front of the park.
The furniture was shabby, of mixed periods, and there was not very much of it in proportion to the size of the room.
The walnut double-bed had already been in place, facing the windows, when Humphrey Arbell's mother had come to Coombe as a bride.
Valentine slowly changed her shoes, looked at her face and hair in the looking-glass without much attention and automatically pushed the loose silvery wave over her forehead into position.
She felt faintly disturbed.
It was not that she was afraid of meeting Rory Lonergan—if it should be Rory Lonergan.
On the contrary, she'd be disappointed if it wasn't Rory Lonergan. The idea of seeing him again brought with it a curious emotional excitement, partly amused and partly sentimental.
Her perturbation, Valentine found, arose from a faint sense of remorse that she had, by implication, accepted her brother's trivial estimate of the "very silly business" of twenty-five years earlier.
Reggie would necessarily see it like that—would have seen it like that even if he'd known far more about it than he ever had known.
But Valentine was clearly aware that what had happened that week in Rome in the spring of nineteen hundred and fourteen had held for her a reality that she had never found since.
II
The evening meal at Coombe was still called dinner. It was announced, in a breathless and inaudible manner, by a fifteen-year-old parlour-maid.
The General nightly struggled into a patched and faded smoking-jacket of maroon velvet. Valentine Arbell—shuddering with cold—put on a three-year-old black chiffon afternoon dress and a thick Chinese shawl of embroidered silk of which the fringes caught in every available piece of furniture whenever she moved.
Jess, under violent protest, still obeyed the rule that compelled her to exchange warm and comfortable breeches or a tweed skirt and wool jumper for an outgrown silk or cotton frock from the previous summer.
"But once I've gone into uniform, mummie, never again," she said.
Valentine
