Death of a Huntsman by H.E. Bates

afternoon:
    â€˜Nobody knows about it. It’s the colour of—No, Iwon’t tell you. You’ll see it tomorrow and then you can tell me if it reminds you of anything.’
    Instantly he recalled the quinces and how the lamp of summer had gone out.
    Somehow he got through the rest of the dance without betraying that he was in a turmoil of fright and indecision. He had broken out already into a cold and sickening sweat but as the dance ended he had presence of mind enough to mop his forehead with his handkerchief and say:
    â€˜It’s awfully hot in here, Edna. My glasses are getting misty. Do you mind if I go and clean them? And wouldn’t you like a drink? Can I bring you something—gin and something?—would you?—by all means, yes——’
    He escaped, spent five minutes in an empty back corridor breathing on his spectacles, polishing them and then in sheer fright breathing on them again. After that he worked his way to the corner of the bar and restored himself with a whisky, saying desperately at the last moment:
    â€˜No, a large one, large one please.’
    Then he took the drink back into the corridor. He had hardly leaned against the wall and had actually not lifted the glass to his lips when he looked up and saw Valerie Whittington suddenly appear at the far end of the corridor as if she had in some miraculous way come up through a trap door.
    She started to walk towards him. She walked quite slowly, upright, shoulders square and splendid, the motion of her legs just breaking the front of the dresswith ripples. And across the vision of her walking slowly down towards him he caught for the flash of a second the former vision of her in the gabardine mackintosh, schoolgirlish, tense and obliterated, the pig-tails tucked into the collar at the back.
    A moment later she was saying:
    â€˜I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking did I have it on under the mackintosh, aren’t you?’
    â€˜Partly that——’
    â€˜I hadn’t,’ she said. ‘It was easy. I got the shop to send it here. I’d hardly a thing on under the mackintosh.’
    She started to smile. Her lips were made-up, a pale red, and she had managed once again to pile her hair into a mass of curls. She did not speak again for a moment or two. She continued to smile at him with the large circular brown eyes that so often seemed to embrace him with tenderness and then at last she said:
    â€˜Does it remind you of anything?’
    â€˜Of course,’ he said.
    To his surprise the two words seemed to move her very deeply and he saw that there were sudden tears in her eyes.
    â€˜You’re the bestest good one in the world,’ she said and she pressed her face against his own.
    He too found himself very moved by that. He wished he had nothing to do but take her by one of the long black gloves and into the dark spaces of parkland outside the house, but he remembered Edna Whittington.
    Some of his anxiety about this must have crossed his face because almost immediately she said:
    â€˜I’ll tell you something else you’re thinking too, shall I?’
    Harry Barnfield, only too well aware of what he was thinking, could not answer.
    â€˜You’re thinking you’ve got to dance with me.’
    â€˜Well——’
    He inclined his head a fraction down and away from her. When he looked up at her again he was struck by a wonderful air of composure about her face, the wide bare shoulders and especially the hands, black in their gloves, clasped lightly before the waist-line of the yellow dress. She could not have looked more composed if she had been wearing the dress for the fiftieth instead of the first time but he knew, somehow, in spite of it all, that she was frightened.
    â€˜It’s got to be done,’ she said, ‘and I can’t do it without you.’
    He tried not to look into her eyes. They were no longer wet with even the suspicion