‘Yes, a little,’ and we turned back towards the house.
Hugo felt the same as I did, or something like it.
I knew that, and he knew that I knew, but we could not speak
of what we felt. For the first time in our lives we had something
to hide.
We turned back towards the house, through the Jasmine Gate, and
past the rose garden. Francis, the cat, ran silently across the
lawn in front of us. Two people were walking about by the statues
at the end of the path. I think they were Anthony Cowper and
Mary Lacey, but they did not matter. The light streamed out from
the windows of the drawing-room, and in a great shaft from the
open garden door. The music was stopping again as we reached
it, and more couples came out, laughing, and some wiping their
faces, for the night was still very warm. Hugo and I went in.
We did not dance together again that evening, and the light had
gone out for me.
I did not know what I had done, but I felt miserable, and somehow
oddly ashamed.
The next day both Hugo and I went back to school.
We did not meet again till the end of the summer, for that August
Guy and Hugo went abroad, to France and Italy.
My grandmother came to Yearsly with me, and part of the time
the Lacey girls were there, but the place seemed empty and all
wrong without Guy and Hugo.
They came back in September only a week before I went back to
school, and two other friends of Guy’s came too.
In October Hugo went up to Oxford with Guy, but I did not see
them there till the next spring.