“But you will come back in a week,” she stipulated, “won’t you?  The Commodore will be here on Thursday, and there are things accumulating which he must see to.  So will you come on Friday?”

“Friday morning,” Hillyard suggested.

Thursday was the day on which he should have travelled down to Rackham Park, but if he could finish his business on Friday morning, he would only lose one day.

“Friday morning then,” said Miss Cheyne, and made a note of it.

Hillyard had thus a week in which to resume his friendships, arrange to write, at some distant time, a play, revisit his club and his tailor, and revel, as at a pageant, in the fresh beauty, the summer clothes, the white skin and clean-limbed boyishness of English girls.  He went through, in a word, the first experiences of most men returned from a long sojourn in other climes; and they were ordinary enough.  But the week was made notable for him by one small incident.

It was on the Monday and about five o’clock in the afternoon.  He was walking from the Charing Cross Road towards Leicester Square, when, from a doorway ahead of him, a couple emerged.  They did not turn his way but preceded him, so that he only saw their backs.  But he had no doubt who one of the couple was.  The fair hair, the tall, slim, long-limbed figure, the perverse sloppiness of dress which could not quite obscure her grace of youth, betrayed the disdainful prodigy of Rackham Park.  The creator of Linda Spavinsky swam ahead of him.  Had he doubted her identity, a glance at the door from which she had emerged would have dispelled the doubt.  It was the entrance to a picture gallery, where, cubes and curves having served their turn and gone, the rotundists were having an innings.  Everybody and everything was in rounds, palaces and gardens and ships and Westminster Bridge, and men and women were all in circles.  The circle was the principle of life and art.  Joan Whitworth would be drawn to the exhibition as a filing to a magnet.  Undoubtedly Joan Whitworth was ahead of Hillyard and he began to hurry after her.  But he checked himself after a few paces.  Or rather the aspect of her companion checked him.  His appearance was vaguely familiar, but that was all.  It was not certainly Sir Chichester Splay, for the all-sufficient reason that the Private View had long gone by; since the very last week of the exhibition was announced in the window.  Moreover, the man in front of him was younger than Sir Chichester.

The couple, however, crossed the road to the Square Garden, and Hillyard saw the man in profile.  He stopped so suddenly that a man walking behind him banged heavily against his back.  The man walked on and turned round after he had passed to stare at Hillyard.  For Hillyard stood stock still, he was unaware that any one had run into him, in all his body his lips alone moved.

“Mario,” he whispered.  “Mario Escobar!”