Out here it seemed as though the people of England must be shaped in the body like the kings and queens, knights and pawns of the chessboard, so strange were their differences, so marked and so implicitly believed in.

They had to part in order to circumvent a crowd.

“They believe in God,” said Rachel as they regained each other.  She meant that the people in the crowd believed in Him; for she remembered the crosses with bleeding plaster figures that stood where foot-paths joined, and the inexplicable mystery of a service in a Roman Catholic church.

“We shall never understand!” she sighed.

They had walked some way and it was now night, but they could see a large iron gate a little way farther down the road on their left.

“Do you mean to go right up to the hotel?” Helen asked.

Rachel gave the gate a push; it swung open, and, seeing no one about and judging that nothing was private in this country, they walked straight on.  An avenue of trees ran along the road, which was completely straight.  The trees suddenly came to an end; the road turned a corner, and they found themselves confronted by a large square building.  They had come out upon the broad terrace which ran round the hotel and were only a few feet distant from the windows.  A row of long windows opened almost to the ground.  They were all of them uncurtained, and all brilliantly lighted, so that they could see everything inside.  Each window revealed a different section of the life of the hotel.  They drew into one of the broad columns of shadow which separated the windows and gazed in.  They found themselves just outside the dining-room.  It was being swept; a waiter was eating a bunch of grapes with his leg across the corner of a table.  Next door was the kitchen, where they were washing up; white cooks were dipping their arms into cauldrons, while the waiters made their meal voraciously off broken meats, sopping up the gravy with bits of crumb.  Moving on, they became lost in a plantation of bushes, and then suddenly found themselves outside the drawing-room, where the ladies and gentlemen, having dined well, lay back in deep arm-chairs, occasionally speaking or turning over the pages of magazines.  A thin woman was flourishing up and down the piano.

“What is a dahabeeyah, Charles?” the distinct voice of a widow, seated in an arm-chair by the window, asked her son.

It was the end of the piece, and his answer was lost in the general clearing of throats and tapping of knees.

“They’re all old in this room,” Rachel whispered.

Creeping on, they found that the next window revealed two men in shirt-sleeves playing billiards with two young ladies.

“He pinched my arm!” the plump young woman cried, as she missed her stroke.

“Now you two—­no ragging,” the young man with the red face reproved them, who was marking.

“Take care or we shall be seen,” whispered Helen, plucking Rachel by the arm.  Incautiously her head had risen to the middle of the window.