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last of the loading. I hopped across to tell you in case I mightn’t see you again before I leave. Phil”—his voice dropped a tone—“you wouldn’t change the invitation, would you . . . make it dinner tonight, or an hour together after dinner?” She hesitated, conscious of his flush and a tiny spurt of exhilaration in her own veins.
    “I don’t see why not. Come early, about seven.”
    He gave her a strangled little smile, gripped her fingers and dropped them, said, “I’ll be here!” and loped away down the path.
    After lunch she rested on her bed with a book, but later, when Manoela had brought tea and the windows on the shaded side of the house admitted a grateful breath of cooler air, Phil let her thoughts dwell dispassionately on Roger Crawford.
    He had told her a little about hit family: his father a bank clerk in a small industrial town and his sister married to a back-street bookseller. Roger, like most agreeable young men, had a strong streak of sentimentality. He visualized the day when he would step ashore at Liverpool and hug his parents; the conventional wanderer’s return. When his time on Valeira was ended he was going into partnership with his brother-in-law; and Phil could imagine no drearier fate than to be planted amid the broad-vowelled middle-class in a grey north-country town with a husband she had married for convenience.
    However, by the time Roger presented himself, his hair sleek, his white jacket and slacks crisp from the laundry boy, Phil had forgotten her dismal meditations, and was faintly thrilled at the prospect of entertaining a clean-cut young overseer to dinner. In his honour she wore a green linen frock which reached the bend of her knees and allowed a fraction more breathing space in the bodice than her other dresses.
    They ate a pot roast and sweet potatoes mashed with butter and seasoning, and followed it up with a tinned compote of fruit and whipped tinned cream, and rye biscuits topped with soft cheese and served with tender green bamboo shoots. They took coffee on the veranda, which was a treat for Phil; it was a long time since she had smelt such a cool, night-scented breeze. The ceaseless roar of the sea was narcotic.
    Roger broke into the calm, silence. “This morning I was tickled pink at the thought of a holiday from the island. Tonight I’m less sure. Will you miss me, Phil?”
    She smiled. “I shall miss the tennis. Clin Dakers is the only other player and he’s gone off again today for a spell in the woods.”
    “I don’t like Clin. I’m glad he’ll be away while I am.”
    “What’s wrong with him?”
    “He’s too smooth and cocksure. There’s something queer about a chap who consistently wins at poker. And I loathe the way he talks.”
    “You mean what he talks about?”
    He nodded. “If it isn’t the lions he’s killed in the Congo, it’s the women he’s floored.”
    “With his looks and physique both might be true,” she reminded him. “Clin’s single-track, but so are the other men here. Mr. Drew is only alive to his work, Matt exists chiefly for that round tummy of his, and you are devoured by the wondrous vision of a bookshop in small-town Lancashire.”
    “That isn’t true,” he protested. “I never think of home except when the mail comes in—and that’s not often. God knows, I try hard enough to keep my keel even. It’s not too easy, when you’re tied to the same four walls with a man like Drew. He can sit for hours doing nothing.”
    “How frightful,” she said soberly. “I should throttle him.”
    He laughed, but without pleasure, and let a full minute elapse before stating, “As soon as you’re eighteen, Phil, I’m going to ask you to marry me.”
    Well, here it was. She had only to answer: “Don’t let’s wait till I’m eighteen, Roger. Let me go with you tomorrow to Lagos and we’ll come back man and wife.”
    Instead, she looked out into the garden and said lightly, “Thanks for the warning,” and moved