“Shall I tell you I was afraid, or ashamed, or intolerably miserable? I don’t know what I felt, it is a dead moment. I don’t know how long he stood there, filling the doorway with his great figure, filling my life with his stern eyes. But it couldn’t have been for long, perhaps a few seconds; and once he took his eyes off mine and looked at the man beside me, who hadn’t seen him. I thought his lips twitched, but then something happened to my sight, and the mirror clouded over. When I could see again, the door was closed, the magic mirror was empty of all but my unbelieving eyes and the profile of the man beside me, who didn’t know and was never to know that I had lived a century while he ate a potato. “All that he did know was that the next morning I begged him to observe but not, please, to comment on my movements, which were in the direction of a London train. I treated that man abominably, abominably. But he never had a chance.... When I got home I found a wire. I had given orders for nothing, not even wires, to be sent on to me. This one had come an hour after I had left for Wales. It was from Southampton. ‘Just arrived. Am going straight up to the little place in Wales. Will arrive there dinner-time. Shall we dine together by the window?’” Shelmerdene was rather absent-minded as she finished her story; she forgot to smile. It was very careless of Shelmerdene to forget to smile, for it made Raymond Paris feel shy; he fiddled with his pen; he coughed. “Well,” said Shelmerdene, at last, “won’t that story do for you, Raymond? Or is it not interesting enough? Not enough action?” “Of course, it’s frightfully interesting,” Raymond Paris protested. “But--well, you see, editors are rather odd. It isn’t a story at all, really, don’t you see....” “An episode, perhaps?” The young man started at a certain quality in her voice; something seemed to have suddenly broken in Shelmerdene’s voice. Wondering, he stared at the lady who stood above him by the table, her fingers playing thoughtfully with the ancient pink shagreen cigarette-case, which had once been vanity-box in chief to Marie Antoinette, so they said. And he followed her eyes out of the window into the garden below, the garden brave with the gay tall tulips of many colours. A man was walking in the garden, not heeding the tulips, not heeding anything, the back of a great figure of a man with a golf-bag swung across it, a lounging man with hands stuck very deep into plus-fours and a pipe screwed into the corner of his mouth; and the tall man’s hair was extraordinarily fair in the sunlight. George Tarlyon was walking through the garden of tulips on his way to a morning round of golf.