Derrick was not looking well, his eyes were heavy with sleeplessness, and the Major had been unusually exasperating at breakfast that morning, so that he started with a jaded, worn-out feeling that would not wholly yield even to the excitement of this long-expected meeting with Freda.

When he found himself in the great drawing-room at Lord Probyn's house, amid a buzz of talk and a crowd of strange faces, he was seized with one of those sudden attacks of shyness to which he was always liable.

In fact, he had been so long alone with the old Major that this plunge into society was too great a reaction, and the very thing he had longed for became a torture to him.
Freda was at the other end of the room talking to Keith Collins, the well-known member for Codrington, whose curious but attractive face was known to all the world through the caricatures of it in 'Punch.' I knew that she saw Derrick, and that he instantly perceived her, and that a miserable sense of separation, of distance, of hopelessness overwhelmed him as he looked.

After all, it was natural enough.

For two years he had thought of Freda night and day; in his unutterably dreary life her memory had been his refreshment, his solace, his companion.