Jack Compton's Luck. Paula Marshall

Lacey and Jack had been stricken dumb by their unexpected meeting. Jack was the worst afflicted since he had had no notion that Lacey was other than miles away in London, enjoying the season to the full, whereas Lacey did at least know that Jack lived somewhere nearby.

      What Lacey wanted to say, but could not in this company was, ‘Why did you not answer any of my letters?’ What she did say was, ‘I had no idea that Sussex was such a lovely county,’ and all that Jack could find to answer her with was,

      ‘Yes, it is, isn’t it.’

      The good thing was that after this exchange of banalities, so different from their previous lively conversations, they both began to laugh at themselves at the same time. Surprised heads turned a little at their amusement. They were saved from further embarrassment by the ringing of the dinner bell.

      ‘You know,’ Lacey whispered to him, after they had sat down, ‘if all our meetings had been productive of such horrendous social clichés I don’t think that I would have been so cross with you for not answering my letters. Rather, I should have been relieved!’

      ‘There was a reason for my not replying,’ Jack whispered back to her.

      ‘It had better be a good one. The only happy thing about it was that Aunt Sue was very pleased that you didn’t write because she hoped that it would mean the end of the affair.’

      ‘Hardly an affair,’ was Jack’s murmuring answer.

      ‘In action, not, but in spirit I rather think that it was.’

      She could have said nothing more calculated to make Jack wish that he could kiss her on the spot. He was not used to such charming frankness and its effect on him was to make him forget his determination to have nothing more to do with her.

      He could not give her up, he could not. She was offering earth, fire and water to his soul, which had been starved for so long of such essentials of the spiritual, as well as the physical, life. They had early passed the boundary where lust turned to love and he could no more deny the bond that had been forged between them in their few short meetings than he could have denied the basic tenets of honour and duty by which he ruled his life.

      Dinner passed like a dream. All they ate tasted the same: it was either manna or nothing. They compelled themselves, out of sheer good manners, to talk to their other dinner companions, but the pretty girl on Jack’s left remained as anonymous to him as the sturdily handsome young sportsman on Lacey’s right was to her.

      Both of them were deeply grateful for the discipline of formal etiquette and correct social behaviour which had been ingrained in them from birth since it made them function almost mechanically, their hidden being remaining focused on each other and on no one else.

      Jack thought later that only the cynically pragmatic Judson would have twigged the double mental life they were leading and that as a consequence of his instinct rather than his intellect. It was that instinct which caused both Will and himself to offer him their respect.