Walking behind her, Orvil noticed that the pearls were slightly dulled with waxy dirt where they lay against the white skin on the back of her neck.

“I’m afraid this one hasn’t got much of a view,” she said, throwing open the door of a large room on the first floor. It had two beds in it, so Orvil realized that it was the one intended for himself and Ben. But Ben would not be back from camp for a few more days yet. He went to the window and looked across a court to another wing of the building. Below him was a huddle of outhouse roofs—buildings that looked like the laundry and the electric-light plant.

The young woman turned to him and said roguishly, “But boys don’t mind whether there’s a view or not, do they!”

Mr. Pym had to smile and nod his head for Orvil. Orvil would do nothing but turn away and scowl. He hated other people to imagine that they understood his mind because he was a boy. The woman’s words made him hate the drab outlook from the window. It was insulting.

His father followed the young woman to a room in the new wing, and Orvil was left alone. After choosing the bed nearest the window, he unpacked his suitcase, hiding the stolen lipstick under the paper at the back of the pot-de-chambre cupboard. He sometimes liked to call the article by this pompous name. It reminded him of his childhood when he and a friend used to play a curiousprecocious game in which they both pretended to be noble ladies at a ball. One would always begin by asking the other, “And what, if I may ask, is that exquisite perfume you are wearing tonight, Duchess?”

The other would then flutter an imaginary fan and simper before replying, “It is Guerlain’s new Pot-de-Chambre, my dear Countess. Is it permitted to ask what your ravishing odour is?”

“Certainly, Duchess; I am honoured that you like it. It is Chanel’s latest Vase-de-Nuit.” The language was always extremely formal, affected and stilted.

This game, with endless variations, would go on for whole afternoons together.

Orvil had originally discovered the two French phrases by one of those idle questions which he loved to put to his mother. “Mummy, what would I ask for if I suddenly woke up in France in the middle of the night?” he had said. When his mother told him what to call for, he was struck by the likeness of the phrases to the names of his mother’s scents. And so the whole game had slowly been evolved. To get new names of perfumers, Orvil ransacked his mother’s cupboards. He took it that both ‘Veet’ and ‘Odorono’ were such rare Eastern cosmetics that they were kept specially hidden; and the registered name of a certain towel ranked in his mind with those of the dressmakers Worth and Schiaparelli. He realized that his mother could not be expected to furnish a long list of French improprieties suitable for imaginary names of scents, so he and the other child were reduced to poring over her signed menus of past dinner-parties. There they found such exciting things as ‘Bisque d’écrevisses’ and ‘Baba à l’Impératrice.’ This last seemed delightfully naughty and rude, because Orvil translated it with much conviction as ‘Bobbles of the Empress’ and ‘Bobbles’ had been his first nurse’s childish name for teats . . .

Orvil shut the door of the bedside cupboard and left hisroom. He found his way down the passage to the head of the broad stairs. Below him in the court he saw groups of people sitting in armchairs. They wore that very sad look of people who have nothing to do before they dress for dinner.

Orvil hurried past them to the front door, turning his eyes away. He could not look straight at their gloom and boredom. Even the first sharp glimpse of it had been enough to cast some thick melancholy over him.

At the beginning of this story I have told how Orvil wandered out into the gardens on his first night at the hotel. We have reached this point now.

Choosing a pink serpentine path, he made his way into the heart of a shrubbery. Although it was still high summer, a feeling of departed glory seemed to hang in the evening air. The gentleness of the sun on his face was telling and sad.

Orvil passed out of the dark shrubbery and found himself on a terrace where a fountain played into a large round bowl.