While the family was having coffee on the terrace after dinner, she slipped away from them to reappear lower down among the rose trees, her white dress gathering all that was left of the lingering glow.

The junior partner, feeling himself never so much junior, though he knew it was but a scant year or two, sat on through Lessing's inconsequential comment on business and the day's adventures, hearing not a word; now and then his chair creaked with the intensity of his preoccupation.

It grew dusk and the lamps blossomed in the house behind them; presently Clarice slipped away to the children and the evening damp fell over the rose garden.

Peter could endure it no longer.

He believed as he rose suddenly with a stretching movement that he meant merely to relieve the tension of sitting by pacing up and down; it was unaccountable therefore that he should find himself at the edge of the terrace.