Lucy could no longer see the faces, but she felt the silence go suddenly blank. Become void and dead. It was the difference between a summer silence full of bird-notes and leaves and wind in the grasses, and the frozen stillness of some Arctic waste. And then, into the dead void just as they reached the door, came the first faint sibilant whisper as they repeated the name.

“Rouse!” they were saying. “Rouse!”

And Lucy, stepping into the warm sunlight, shivered. The sound reminded her of frozen particles being swept over a snow surface by a bitter wind. She even remembered where she had seen and heard those particles: that Easter she had spent on Speyside when they had missed the Grantown bus and they were a long way from home and they had to walk it every foot of the way, under a leaden sky into a bitter wind over a frozen world. She felt a long way from home now, crossing the sunny courtyard to the quadrangle door, and the sky seemed to her as leaden as any Highland one in a March storm. She wished for a moment that she were at home, in her own quiet little sitting-room, settling down for a Sunday afternoon of unbroken peace, untouched by human problems and unhurt by human griefs. She toyed with the idea of inventing an excuse to go when tomorrow morning’s post would give her a chance; but she had looked forward like a child to the Demonstration on Friday, and she had now a quite personal interest in what had promised to be for her merely something new in spectacles. She knew all the Seniors personally and a great many of the Juniors; she had talked “Dem.” with them, shared their half-fearful anticipation of it, even helped to make their costumes. It was the summit, the triumphant flower, the resounding full-stop of their College careers, and she could not bear to go without seeing it; without being part of it.

She had dropped the rest of the Staff, who were bound for the front of the house, but Wragg, coming behind her to pin a notice on the students’ board, mopped her forehead in frank relief and said: “Thank heaven that is over. I think it was the worst thing I have ever had to do. I couldn’t eat my lunch with thinking of it.” And Lucy remembered that there had indeed been the phenomenon of a large piece of tart unfinished on Miss Wragg’s plate.

That was life, that was. Innes had Heaven’s door shut in her face, and Wragg couldn’t finish her pudding!

No one had yet come out of the dining-room — College appetites being so much larger than Staff ones, their meals lasted at least ten or fifteen minutes longer — so the corridors were still deserted as Lucy went up to her room. She resolved to get away from Leys before the crowd of students overran the countryside. She would go away deep into the green and white and yellow countryside, and smell the may and lie in the grass and feel the world turning on its axis, and remember that it was a very large world, and that College griefs were wild and bitter but soon over and that in the Scale of Things they were undeniably Very Small Beer.

She changed her shoes to something more appropriate to field paths, crossed to the “old house” and ran down the front stairs and out by the front door so as to avoid the students who would now be percolating out of the dining-room. The “old house” was very silent and she deduced that there had been no lingering in the drawing-room after lunch today. She skirted the house and made for the field behind the gymnasium, with vague thoughts of Bidlington and The Teapot stirring in her mind. The hedge of may was a creamy foam on her right and on her left the buttercups were a golden sea. The elms, half-floating in the warm light, were anchored each to its purple shadow, and daisies patterned the short grass under her feet. It was a lovely world, a fine round gracious world, and no day for — Oh, poor Innes! poor Innes! — no day for the world to turn over and crush one.

It was when she was debating with herself whether to cross the little bridge, to turn down-stream to Bidlington, or up-stream to the unknown, that she saw Beau. Beau was standing in the middle of the bridge watching the water, but with her green linen dress and bright hair she was so much a part of the sunlight-and-shadow under the willows that Lucy had been unaware that anyone was there. As she came into the shade herself and could see more clearly, Lucy saw that Beau was watching her come, but she gave her no greeting. This was so unlike Beau that Lucy was daunted.

“Hullo,” she said, and leaned beside her on the wooden rail. “Isn’t it beautiful this afternoon?” Must you sound so idiotic? she asked herself.

There was no answer to this, but presently Beau said: “Did you know about this appointment?”

“Yes,” said Lucy. “I— I heard the Staff talking about it.”

“When?”

“Yesterday.”

“Then you knew this morning when you were talking to us.”

“Yes. Why?”

“It would have been kind if someone had warned her.”

“Warned whom?”

“Innes. It isn’t very nice to have your teeth kicked in in public.”

She realised that Beau was sick with rage. Never before had she seen her even out of temper, and now she was so angry that she could hardly talk.

“But how could I have done that?” she asked reasonably, dismayed to be taken personally to task for something that she considered none of her business. “It would have been disloyal to mention it before Miss Hodge had announced her decision. For all I knew she might have altered that decision; when I left her it was still possible that she might see things from —” She stopped, realising where she was headed. But Beau too had realised. She turned her head sharply to look at Miss Pym.

“Oh. You argued with her about it. You didn’t approve of her choice, then?”

“Of course not.” She looked at the angry young face so near her own and decided to be frank. “You might as well know, Beau, that no one approves. The Staff feel about it very much as you do. Miss Hodge is an old friend of mine, and I owe her a great deal, and admire her, but where this appointment is concerned she is ‘on her own.’ I have been desolated ever since I first heard of it, I would do anything to reverse it, to waken up tomorrow and find that it is just a bad dream; but as to warning anyone —” She lifted her hand in a gesture of helplessness.

Beau had gone back to glaring at the water. “A clever woman like you could have thought of something,” she muttered.

The “clever woman” somehow made Beau of a sudden very young and appealing; it was not like the confident and sophisticated Beau to look for help or to think of her very ordinary Pym self as clever. She was after all a child; a child raging and hurt at the wrong that had been done her friend. Lucy had never liked her so well.

“Even a hint,” Beau went on, muttering at the water. “Even a suggestion that there might be someone else in the running. Anything to warn her. To make the shock less shattering. To put her on her guard, so that she wasn’t wide open. It had to be punishment, but it needn’t have been a massacre. You could have sacrificed a little scruple in so good a cause, couldn’t you?”

Lucy felt, belatedly, that perhaps she might have.

“Where is she?” she asked. “Where is Innes?”

“I don’t know. She ran straight out of College before I could catch her up. I know she came this way, but I don’t know where she went from here.”

“She will take it very badly?”

“Did you expect her to be brave and noble about the hideous mess?” Beau said savagely, and then, instantly: “Oh, I’m sorry. I do beg your pardon. I know you’re sorry about it too. I’m just not fit to be spoken to just now.”

“Yes, I am sorry,” Lucy said. “I admired Innes the first time I saw her, and I think she would have been an enormous success at Arlinghurst.”

“Would have been,” muttered Beau.

“How did Miss Rouse take the news? Was she surprised, do you think?”

“I didn’t wait to see,” Beau said shortly. And presently: “I think I shall go up-stream. There is a little thorn wood up there that she is very fond of; she may be there.”

“Are you worried about her?” Lucy asked; feeling that if it were merely comforting that Beau planned, Innes would surely prefer solitude at the moment.

“I don’t think she is busy committing suicide, if that is what you mean. But of course I am worried about her. A shock like that would be bad for anyone — especially coming now, at the end of term when one is tired. But Innes — Innes has always cared too much about things.” She paused to look at the water again. “When we were Juniors and Madame used to blister us with her sarcasm — Madame can be simply unspeakable, you know — the rest of us just came up in weals but Innes was actually flayed; just raw flesh. She never cried, as some of the others did when they’d had too much for one go. She just — just burned up inside. It’s bad for you to burn up inside. And once when —” She stopped, and seemed to decide that she had said enough. Either she had been on the verge of an indiscretion or she came to the conclusion that discussing her friend with a comparative stranger, however sympathetic, was not after all the thing to do. “She has no oil on her feathers, Innes,” she finished.

She stepped off the bridge and began to walk away up the path by the willows. “If I was rude,” she said, pausing just before she disappeared, “do forgive me. I didn’t mean to be.”

Lucy went on looking at the smooth silent water, wishing passionately that she could recover the little red book which she had consigned so smugly to the brook two days ago, and thinking of the girl who had no “duck’s back”— no protective mechanism against the world’s weather. The girl who could neither whimper nor laugh; who “burned up inside” instead. She rather hoped that Beau would not find her until the worst was over; she had not run to Beau for sympathy, she had run as far and as fast from human company as she could, and it seemed only fair to let her have the solitude she sought.

It would do Beau no harm at any rate, Lucy thought, to find that the world had its snags and its disappointments; life had been much too easy for Beau. It was a pity that she had to learn at Innes’s expense.

She crossed the bridge into the games field, turned her face to open country and took the hedge gaps as they came; hoping that she might not overtake Innes, and determined to turn a blind eye in her direction if she did. But there was no Innes. No one at all moved in the Sunday landscape. Everyone was still digesting roast beef. She was alone with the hedges of may, the pasture, and the blue sky. Presently she came to the edge of a slope, from which she could look across a shallow valley to successive distances, and there she sat with her back against an oak, while the insects hummed in the grass, and the fat white clouds sailed up and passed, and the slow shadow of the tree circled round her feet. Lucy’s capacity for doing nothing was almost endless, and had been the despair of both her preceptors and her friends.

It was not until the sun was at hedge level that she roused herself to further decision. The result of her self-communing was a realisation that she could not face College supper tonight; she would walk until she found an inn, and in the half-dark she would come back to a College already hushed by the “bedroom” bell. She made a wide circle round, and in half an hour saw in the distance a steeple she recognised, whereupon she jettisoned her thoughts of an inn and wondered if The Teapot was open on Sundays. Even if it wasn’t perhaps she could persuade Miss Nevill to stay her pangs with something out of a can. It was after seven before she reached the outskirts of Bidlington, and she looked at the Martyr’s Memorial — the only ugly erection in the place — with something of a fellow interest, but the open door of The Teapot restored her. Dear Miss Nevill. Dear large clever business-like accommodating Miss Nevill.

She walked into the pleasant room, already shadowed by the opposite cottages, and found it almost empty. A family party occupied the front window, and in the far corner were a young couple who presumably owned the expensive coupé which was backed in at the end of the garden. She thought it clever of Miss Nevill to manage that the room should still look spotless and smell of flowers after the deluge of a Sunday’s traffic in June.

She was looking round for a table when a voice said: “Miss Pym!”

Lucy’s first instinct was to bolt: she was in no mood for student chat at the moment; and then she noticed that it was The Nut Tart. The Nut Tart was the female half of the couple in the corner. The male half was undoubtedly “my cousin”; the Rick who thought her adorable and who was referred to in College parlance as “that gigolo.”

Desterro rose and came over to meet her — she had charming manners on formal occ............