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like riding boots; but I expect they were rubber; very sensible, for it was raining.’

‘Could it have been Agatha Milford?—but Agatha would hardly come to London in riding clothes.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t Miss Milford—I remember her perfectly; I met her here at tea one day, you know. She’s lovely. This girl had very big eyes and looked rather ill-tempered; but perhaps she was only very intellectual or artistic. It was at that show of queer pictures in Grafton Street.—Clive didn’t see me, so I didn’t interrupt them.’

Monica asked no further question but she had, already, a sense of something surreptitious that faintly menaced her. She telephoned to Celia that evening and asked her to come and dine with them and bring her violin. Since they had first played together, since Celia’s childhood, Clive had been their audience, so much at one with them in his part of listener that they made a trio rather than a duet. But he had seemed tired that night when he came in and she had felt, all through the lovely Schubert Sonatina, that he was not really listening, that he was not thinking of her or Celia or Schubert but of the queer dark girl. And after that, as the days passed and he said nothing of the new friend,