So the buoyant one spread the rumour that ran its course and died, and had to be galvanised into life once more to furnish an answer to Sybil’s questionings, when, returning from the Fortunate or other Isles, she asked for news of her old friend. And the rumour did not satisfy her. She had had time to think—there was plenty of time to think in those Islands whose real name escapes me—and she knew very much more than she had known on the evening when Rupert had broken her pet fan and asked for a kiss which he had not taken. She found herself quite fervently disbelieving in the grand tour theory—and the disbelief was so strong that it distorted life and made everything else uninteresting. Sybil took to novel-reading as other folks have in their time taken to drink. She was young, and she could still lose herself in a book. One day she lost herself most completely in a new novel from Mudie’s, a book that every one was talking about. She lost herself; and suddenly, in a breathless joy that was agony too, she found him. This was his book. No one but Rupert could have written it—all that description of the park, and the race when she rode the goat and he rode the pig—and—she turned the
