The Truants by A.E.W. Mason

The dusk was deepening quickly into darkness. As she ran down the open stretch of hillside between her villa and the little town, she saw the lights blaze out upon the terrace of Monte Carlo. Far below her, upon her right, they shone like great opals, each with a heart of fire. Pamela stopped for a second to regain her breath before she reached Roquebrune. The sudden brightness of those lights carried her thoughts backwards to the years when the height of trouble for her had been the sickness of a favourite horse, and all her life was an eager expectation. On so many evenings she had seen those lights flash out through the gathering night while she had sat talking in her garden with the little schoolmaster whom she was now to revisit. To both of them those lights had been a parable. They had glowed in friendliness and promise -- thus she had read the parable -- out of a great, bright, gay world of men and women, upon a cool, twilit garden of youth and ignorance.

She thought of what had come in place of all that imagined gaiety. To the schoolmaster, disappointment and degradation; while, as for herself, she felt very lonely upon this evening. "The world is a place of great sadness." Thus had M. Giraud spoken when Pamela had returned to Roquebrune from her first season in London, and the words now came back to her again.