A man came strolling along the terrace. He was in gray flannels, wore a straw hat and was swinging a cane jauntily. He had a distinct waist-line and humorous blue eyes. He was the kind of man who keeps a valet. “Hulloa! Something wrong?” Teddy unstooped his shoulders. “Nothing much. Nothing that I can’t put right.” “Well, I’m going in here.” The man glanced across his shoulder at the house. “If it’s water you want or anything like that, or if you’d care to use the phone----” Teddy flushed scarlet beneath his tan. So this cheerful looking person was Horace who, cooperating with Fluffy, had set an example that had cheapened all love’s values? “I won’t trouble you. Thanks all the same.” Had he dared, he would have accepted the proffered assistance. But Desire would guess; they all would guess that he had acted a lie to gain an entrance. Contempt for the foolishness of his situation made him hurry. The car made a miraculous recovery--so miraculous that the blue eyes twinkled with dawning knowledge. “Come a long way to judge from the dust! From Glastonbury, perhaps?” Teddy jumped to the seat and seized the wheel. “Yes, from Glastonbury,” he said hastily. As he drove away he muttered, “Played me like a trout! He’s no cause to laugh when he’s been refused himself.” From the end of the terrace, he glanced back. The man, with leisurely self-possession, was entering the house. He felt for him the impotent envy that Dives in torment felt, when he saw Lazarus lying on Abraham’s bosom. He tried to jeer himself out of his melancholy. “I’m very young,” he kept saying. But when he imagined the party of three at breakfast, he could have wept. Now that she had vanished, he remembered only her allurement. Her faults became attractions: her coldness was modesty; her defense of Fluffy, loyalty; her unreasonable request that he should come to America, love. What girl would expect a man to do that unless she loved him? The reality of his predicament began to grow upon him. This wasn’t a romance or a dream he had invented; it had happened. In a shadowed spot, overlooking the canal, he halted the car. He must think matters out--must get a grip on himself before he went further. Water-carts were going up and down. Well-groomed men were walking briskly through the park on their way to business. Boys and girls on bicycles passed him, going out by way of Hampstead for a day in the country. The absolute normality of life, its level orderliness, thrust itself upon him. He looked at the sedate rows of houses, showing up substantially behind sun-drenched branches. He saw their window-boxes, their whitened doorsteps, their general appearance of permanency. The men who lived in those houses wouldn’t say to a girl, “I love you,” in the first half-dozen hours of acquaintance. But neither would the girls say to a seven-hour-old lover, “Come to America”; they wouldn’t even say, “Run down to Southend,” for fear of being thought forward.