"Hasn't there ever been anybody with whom you've dared to be really yourself?"
"No. Never really. Sometimes, for a little while, and in patches—but not always and about everything—oh no."
There was a sudden burst of noisy laughter from the group round the table, and a scuffle that overturned a wicker stool.... Denis, involuntarily, half stood up. Chrissie's small fingers, shifting to his wrist, gently forced him down again.
"It's all right, dear—don't go."
He sat down again, but the spell was broken. His terrible self-consciousness invaded him, he asked himself in an agony what all this meant—why he was giving himself away like this to a girl whom he didn't know, whom he had met for the first time half an hour ago?
"It's all right," repeated Chrissie urgently.
She seemed instantly to have sensed his change of mood.
"Denis, listen. I knew directly I saw you that we had something to do with one another. I can't tell you why, or what it means exactly. I expect after you've gone away to-night, you'll be frightened again, and wonder how we could ever have talked like this—two people who've only just met. But I want you to trust me. Do you think you could?"
"Chrissie——"
He didn't know what to say, unable to believe in what had befallen him, and fearful of alienating her sympathy either by word or silence.
The other people—he thought of them in a sort of collective confusion—were moving about, talking and laughing, and making a lot of noise. Somebody started a gramophone, and the catchy refrain of a new dance-record blared out into the night.
The cheap appeal of it acted as a direct stimulus to Denis's already quivering emotionalism.
"Do you really mean it? Do you really want us to be friends?" he asked, still half incredulous.
"Really, really, Denis. I'm lonely, too—not like you've been, but quite enough. I'll tell you, some day. I know it sounds absurd, but I think you and I have been looking for one another, all this time."
"I used to think there must be someone like you in the world, and that some day we'd meet," he murmured. "But I'd given up any hope of it—even now, I don't feel it can really be true."
"Anyone want a drink?" shouted a man's voice.
"You don't, do you?" whispered Chrissie.
Denis shook his head, still dazed.
The gramophone record came to an end, and the sound of voices surged up again, interspersed with loud laughter and the chink of glass.
"Chrissie!" someone cried.
She gripped Denis's hand tighter, and did not stir.
"Where's Chrissie?"
"Fallen over the cliff, perhaps. I thought I heard a splash."
"No, she's had an idea and rushed away to put it on paper."
"Gone for a moonlight bathe."
"Who with?"
"Why not by herself? We're not all like you, Coral, trotting about with boy-friends all the time."
"Damn it, I think someone ought to find Chrissie," objected a voice—masculine, and not entirely sober. "She's our hostess, after all. Why, she may be drowned for all we know."
"She was here when we arrived. I saw her."
"I shall have to go in a minute," Chrissie said, speaking low and quickly. "Tell me—how long are you staying at the Hôtel d'Azur?"
"I don't know—about a fortnight or three weeks, I expect. I'm with a Mr. Bolham—" Denis gulped. "I—I'm his temporary secretary, you know."
He minded saying it. He would have liked to pretend that he was staying at the Hôtel d'Azur independently, for a holiday. But Chrissie did not seem to notice the admission of his subordinate position.
"Do you have a certain amount of free time—in the afternoons, for instance, or after dinner?"
"I can usually get off in the afternoons. He works in the mornings, and sometimes between tea and dinner. I could get most of my stuff done in the evenings, if I wanted to."
"If you don't mind the heat——"
"I love it," put in Denis eagerly.
"—Then come down here—no, you haven't got a car. I'll pick you up at the bottom of the Hôtel d'Azur drive, at two o'clock to-morrow. Bring your bathing-things. We'll go to a place I know along the coast. There's never anybody there. We can talk."
"Chrissie, how wonderful! Do you really mean that you want to talk to me?"
Her great dark eyes looking full at him, she answered softly and deliberately:
"Much more than I want anything else in the world."
His head was reeling. It couldn't really be true—presently he would wake up, and life would be what it had always been—a nerve-racking, anxious, unsatisfying affair, shot through with continual shafts of fear—the fear of poverty, of failure, of disgrace—above all, the continual fear of being found out in one way or another.
"Denis, are you happier than when you came here to-night?"
He drew a long breath.
"Oh, my dear. It's like being in another world altogether. Everything's changed."
They looked at one another with enchanted eyes. In hers Denis saw the reflection of his own newborn sincerity. A glowing exaltation seemed to envelop him, persisting all through the riotous hour that followed, when he and Chrissie Challoner were drawn into the vortex of noisy talk and laughter that raged up and down the little dark garden and the stone pavilion.
Angie Moon, dancing languorously with Buckland to the strains of the cheap and raucous gramophone, Coral Romayne screaming gynæcological confidences at Mrs. Wolverton-Gush, Hilary withdrawn in sulky superiority behind the pages of a French novel, other people unknown to him, talking interminably to Chrissie about literary scandals and rumours of scandals—Denis saw and heard them through a haze.
For the first time in his life, he was utterly happy.
(3)
It was one o'clock in the morning when the Buick stopped in front of the Hôtel d'Azur. A single light was burning in the hall, over the desk of the concierge. Madame, sallow-faced and with eyelids puffy from fatigue, sat there making entries in her ledgers. She raised her head and smiled at the noisy entry of Coral Romayne and the Moons, but there was a gleam of hatred in her black eyes.
"Vous avez passé une bonne soirée, messieurs-dames?" she said in an amiable voice, and glanced meaningly up at the clock. "Tout le monde est couché depuis longtemps."
No one answered. Angie said: "I don't know what she's talking about," and walked, with her swaying gait, to the lift.
Buckland was following her, but Mrs. Romayne called out sharply: "It won't take more than two people. It sticks. You can just walk up, Buck."
She went into the tiny lift and slammed the gate. It ascended weakly and jerkily, bearing her and Angie Moon out of sight.
"No hope of a drink, I suppose," grumbled Hilary. He had had a disappointing evening, no one had taken any particular notice of him, and Chrissie Challoner, after all, wasn't his type at all. He suspected her of being a Lesbian, as he did all intelligent women to whom his own masculinity obviously made no immediate appeal. Sulkily he went upstairs.
Denis found himself in his own room, on the third floor, without the slightest recollection of how he had got there.