of
his moral being had been scraped; and all the way down in the train he
thought of Irene in her lonely flat, and of Soames in his lonely
office, and of the strange paralysis of life that lay on them both.
'In chancery!' he thought. 'Both their necks in chancery--and her's so
pretty!'

CHAPTER IX--VAL HEARS THE NEWS

The keeping of engagements had not as yet been a conspicuous feature in
the life of young Val Dartie, so that when he broke two and kept one,
it was the latter event which caused him, if anything, the greater
surprise, while jogging back to town from Robin Hill after his ride with
Holly. She had been even prettier than he had thought her yesterday,
on her silver-roan, long-tailed 'palfrey'; and it seemed to him,
self-critical in the brumous October gloaming and the outskirts
of London, that only his boots had shone throughout their two-hour
companionship. He took out his new gold 'hunter'--present from
James--and looked not at the time, but at sections of his face in the
glittering back of its opened case. He had a temporary spot over one
eyebrow, and it displeased him, for it must have displeased her. Crum
never had any spots. Together with Crum rose the scene in the promenade
of the Pandemonium. To-day he had not had the faintest desire to
unbosom himself to Holly about his father. His father lacked poetry,
the stirrings of which he was feeling for the first time in his nineteen
years. The Liberty, with Cynthia Dark, that almost mythical embodiment
of rapture; the Pandemonium, with the woman of uncertain age--both
seemed to Val completely 'off,' fresh from communion with this new, shy,
dark-haired young cousin of his. She rode 'Jolly well,' too, so that it
had been all the more flattering that she had let him lead her where he
would in the long gallops of Richmond Park, though she knew them so
much better than he did. Looking back on it all, he was mystified by
the barrenness of his speech; he felt that he could say 'an awful lot of
fetching things' if he had but the chance again, and the thought that
he must go back to Littlehampton on the morrow, and to Oxford on the
twelfth--'to that beastly exam,' too--without the faintest chance of
first seeing her again, caused darkness to settle on his spirit even
more quickly than on the evening. He should write to her, however, and
she had promised to answer. Perhaps, too, she would come up to Oxford to
see her brother. That thought was like the first s