CHAPTER TWENTY-ONEOn the Sunday Amanda gave a formal sherry party to mark the breaking off of her engagement to Albert Campion.
It took place at her cottage on the river near the Alandel works and was one of those elaborately masochistic gestures which the modern cult for the proper sublimation of all the more commonplace emotions has made fashionable among the highly civilised.
Coming, as it did, at the end of one nightmare week and at the beginning of another, it seemed very appropriate and was almost, as Tante Marthe said, the only conceivable kind of celebration which one could decently bring oneself to face in the circumstances.
No one knew the cause of this new trouble, and most people were too worried to care, but the first impression, which was that young Pontisbright had put hi
