refused to travel farther westward than
Marseilles. She was afraid of damp and cold, and she had got the ship's
doctor to order her to the Riviera. She and Veronica had been living for
two years in a small villa at Agaye.

This summer she had come to England. She was no longer afraid of damp
and cold. And Bartie followed her.

Dorothy and Michael had no difficulty in remembering Vera, though it was
more than six years since they had seen her; for Vera looked the same.
Her hair still shone like copper-beech leaves; her face had still the
same colour and the same sweet, powdery smell. And if these things had
changed Frances would still have known her by her forehead that looked
so broad because her eyebrows and her eyes were so long, and by her
fine, unfinished, passionate mouth, by her pointed chin and by her ways.

But though her brother-in-law's ways had always been more or less
disagreeable, Frances was not prepared for the shock of the renewed
encounter with Bartholomew. Bartie was long and grey, and lean even when
you allowed for the thickness of his cholera belt. He wore a white scarf
about his throat, for his idea was that he had cancer in it. Cancer made
you look grey. He, too, had the face of a hawk, of a tired and irritable
hawk. It drooped between his hunched shoulders, his chin hanging above
the scarf as if he were too tired or too irritable to hold it up. He
behaved to Vera and Veronica as if it was they who had worried him into
cancer of the throat, they who tired and irritated him.

Vera talked to him as you might talk to a sick child whose peevishness
prolongs, unreasonably, its pain. Bartie's manner almost amounted to a
public repudiation of her. The whole house vibrated to the shutting of
his door at Good-night time. Yet when Bartie came down in the morning,
late, and more morose than ever, Vera's mouth made as if it kissed some
visionary image of the poor thing's absurdity. She didn't believe for
one minute in his cancer. It was an excuse for the shutting of his door.

She kept out of his way as much as possible; yet, when they were
together they watched each other. They watched; Bartie openly with
sudden dartings and swoopings of his hawk's eyes; Vera furtively. Her
eyes were so large and long that, without turning her head, or any
visible movement, they could hold his image.

But for Captain Cameron Vera's eyes had a full, open gaze. Spread wide
apart under her wide forehead they were like dark