clumsy shapelessness, and his wife had the same common, swarthy, blunted look. An American came down the steps with his wife: he was neatly dressed in the ugly light-greyish clothes that so many Americans wear, his wife was also neatly turned out with the tedious and metallic stylishness of American apparel. They had the naked, inept and uneasy look of tourists; everything about them seemed troubled and alien to the scene, even to the breezy quality of the air and the soft thick skies about them. When they had descended the steps they paused a moment in a worried and undecided way, the man pulled at his watch and peered at it with his meagre prognathous face, and then said nasally:
“Well, we told them we’d be there at four-thirty. It’s about that now.”
All of these people, young and old, French, American, or of whatever nationality, looked dreary, dull and common, and uneasily out of place when compared with Starwick.
After a moment’s shock of stunned surprise, a drunken surge of impossible joy, Eugene ran towards him shouting, “Frank!”
Starwick turned, with a startled look upon his face: in a moment the two young men were shaking hands frantically, almost hugging each other in their excitement, both blurting out at once a torrent of words which neither heard. Finally, when they had grown quieter, Eugene found himself saying:
“But where the hell have you been, Frank? I wrote you twice: didn’t you get any of my letters?—what happened to you?—where were you?—did you go down to the South of France to stay with Egan, as you said you would?”
“Ace,” said Starwick—his voice had the same, strangely mannered, unearthly quality it had always had, only it was more mysterious and secretive than ever before—“Ace, I have been there.”
“But why?—” the other began, “why aren’t you?—” He paused, looking at Starwick with a startled glance. “What happened, Frank?”
For, by his few quiet and non-committal words Starwick had managed to convey perfectly the sense of sorrow and tragedy—of a grief so great it could not be spoken, a hurt so deep it could not be told. His whole personality was now pervaded mysteriously by this air of quiet, speechless and incommunicable sorrow; he looked at the other youth with the eyes of Lazarus returned from the tomb, and that glance said more eloquently than any words could ever do that he now knew and
