PART II
THE DANCE ROUND THE TOWN
I
Quarter of an hour later he left them, making his excuses, promising to return at half-past ten. He could not have stayed another moment, sitting there quietly in his wicker arm-chair looking out on the darkening garden, listening to Crispin's pleasure in Peter Breughel, without giving some kind of vent to his excitement.
He must get away and be by himself. Because—yes, he knew it, and nothing could alter the vehement pulsating truth of it—he was in love for the first time in his life.
As he threaded his way along the garden paths that was at first all that he could see—that he was in love with that child in the shabby frock who was married to that odious creature, that bag-of-bones, who had not opened his mouth the whole evening long—that child terrified out of her life and appealing to him, a stranger, in her despair, to help her.
In love with a married woman, he, Charles Percy Harkness? What would his two sisters, nay, what
