LATE AND SOON. E. M. Delafield
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mind."
"But he can't have gone without saying goodbye to me!"
Looking back she could realize the appeal in that childlike wail of despair and she could see why her mother, arbitrary woman that she was of violent, incalculable moods that were a terror alike to herself and others, had suddenly and for a moment softened.
"You may have five minutes to say goodbye. He's waiting outside."
No need to ask where.
Lady Levallois' eyes had turned to the window over-looking the Pincio Gardens, and Valentine had fled.
Fled to the broken fountain, where Rory Lonergan was.
Oddly enough, she could remember very little of their last interview except that he had kissed her in a way in which he had never kissed her before and that she had been frightened and, at the bottom of her heart, shocked.
Whether they had been five minutes together or half an hour, she had never known. It was the kind Madeleine, her mother's French maid, who had been sent out to fetch her back to the house.
Val had gone, obediently.
Rory Lonergan hadn't asked her to come away with him.
Indeed, thought Valentine Arbell, looking back at Valentine Levallois in her seventeenth year, nothing could have been less possible than that any penniless youth with his living to earn should make such a suggestion.
In time, the certainty that he couldn't even have entertained a serious wish to do so became part of her acceptance of the whole episode.
It had been, as Reggie had said, a very silly business, from every point of view except one, and that one was known only to Valentine.
Those innocent and rapturous hours of love-making that she had shared through that brief fortnight with Rory Lonergan, with the hot May sunlight thrusting through the grey-green olive trees, had taught her the meaning of happiness, pure and complete. Never since had she found it.
In the years that had followed, and beneath which youth lay so deeply buried, Valentine had forgotten a great deal: emotionally, she had long forgotten almost everything about Rory Lonergan.
She had only not forgotten what happiness was, nor mistaken for it any lesser experience.
"The damned Japanese ..." said the General. "The damned Americans ... the damned fools we've got in the Cabinet ..."
He was meditative, rather than annoyed. Jess said that President Roosevelt was a divine man, and she adored him. She scrambled to her feet and announced that she was going to say good-night to Madeleine, who had a small sitting-room of her own on the second floor.
Valentine knew that Jess would turn on Madeleine's radio and that together they would listen to the light-hearted and noisy programmes they both enjoyed and that the General would never tolerate downstairs.
In the summer, they would open up the schoolroom again and Jess should have friends to stay and have a little fun....
But before the summer came, Jess would be gone.
"Shall I come and say good-night to you presently?"
"Okay," said Jess.
She picked up the puppy.
"That dog will lose the use of its legs."
"Poor darling aunt Sophy! Shall I have to get you a little pair of crutches?" crooned Jess to the puppy.
She sketched a salute in the direction of the General—her usual fashion of evading any good-night formula—and went away.
General Levallois gave renewed attention to his puzzle and Valentine took up a book. She was glad to read, but she scarcely ever did so before Jess went upstairs from an obscure feeling that Jess might, one evening, want to claim her mother's attention, and hesitate to interrupt her.
This evening she was paying no heed to her book.
She was thinking, in a strange medley of thoughts, about Primrose's arrival for her week's leave and whether there was any way in which it would be possible to make her enjoy it, and about Rory Lonergan whom one might be going to see again—and as Jess had said, they certainly wouldn't recognize one another—and about Jessica's announcement, that seemed to Valentine almost fantastically unreal, that Primrose—so emphatically belonging to the present—should claim as a friend of her own the man who had for so long belonged to Valentine's own far-away past.
Perhaps she was in love with him.
But he was too old. Rory Lonergan must be forty-seven or forty-eight, and Primrose was twenty-four.
Besides, he had probably married long ago. And although, one had to admit, that wouldn't prevent Primrose from starting what Jess called "quite a thing", it might well prevent Rory Lonergan from doing so.
The General threw down the newspaper and took off his spectacles, exchanging them for another pair.
That meant that he had failed to finish his crossword puzzle successfully.
"Anything happening to-morrow?"
"It's Sunday. On Monday I shall be going to the Red Cross work-party in the afternoon, and up to the village in the evening."
"Another Committee?"
"No. It's the Monthly Meeting of the Women's Institute."
The General made his unfailing rejoinder.
"I suppose you and Mrs. Ditchley will settle the affairs of the nation."
Valentine gave the polite, unmeaning smile with which she, as unfailingly, received the remark.
She was thinking how very much she wished that she could do more, and more important, war work.
Yet, if Coombe was to remain her home and that of the children, it seemed necessary that she should stay there. Her brother had told her flatly, months ago, that it was the only place in which she could be of the slightest real use.
Primrose had declared that women over thirty-five weren't wanted anywhere.
"Especially untrained ones," she had added—and if the first observation hadn't been specially meant for her, Valentine knew that the second one had.
She sat silent, waiting for the hands of the clock to reach half-past ten when she would go, shivering, up the stairs and along the passage to Jessica's room, the fringes of her shawl catching here and there as she moved.
III
The rain had turned to an icy sleet and the temperature dropped many degrees, when Primrose Arbell, two days later, travelled down to Devonshire in a crowded third-class railway carriage.
Everyone in the carriage had gazed at her with a varying degree of attention and Primrose had looked at no one at all, according to her wont.
She endeavoured and expected to attract notice, although not necessarily admiration, for she was under no illusions as to her looks.
Yet she was arresting, aristocratic-looking and, to many men, alluring.
The opinion of women did not interest her.
Primrose was tall, slight and with long and very beautiful lines from shoulder to ankle. She did not always choose her clothes well, but she put them on and carried them, whatever they were, with an insolent, triumphant success. Her face was long and narrow with a long, pointed chin, a high-bridged, arrogant and finely-cut nose and rather large mouth with a curious downward twist at one corner whenever she spoke or—infrequently enough—laughed.
Her most arresting features were her eyes and eyebrows. The brows were dark and thick, in astonishing contrast to her naturally blonde hair, forming arches that suggested a perpetual expression