When Aliette looks back on the three days that followed her lover's first avowal, she can only see herself moving in a strange, rapt exhilaration from room to room of Hector's great house in Lancaster Gate.

Hector, she realized thankfully, would be away till Monday evening: the other inmates of the house--Mollie, Caroline Staley, Lennard the butler, and his female satellites--seemed as though they had been screen-folk, flat phantoms, alive only to the eye.

Vaguely, among those phantoms, she can remember Jimmy Wilberforce, very correct in his evening-clothes, sitting between her and Mollie in the big cream-paneled dining-room.

Dinner over--Aliette remembers--she invented some pretext to leave the pair unchaperoned, and withdrew to the balcony.

It was good to be alone, alone with one's dreams--dreams that made even Bayswater Road beautiful. The road seemed a pathway of radiance. High silver edged it either side; between, the hasting car lights streamed their fans of luminous crystal. Here and there among the trees beyond, her eyes caught the orange flicker of matches, the red of kindled cigarettes.

"Under those trees," she thought, "Ronnie whispered, 'Aliette, don't hate me for loving you.'"

As though she could ever hate him!

A little breeze, blowing cool across London, ruffled her hair. Patting a scarcely displaced curl, she thought: "He kissed these fingers of mine. Another time he will kiss me on the lips. My lips shall answer his kisses."

And all those three days and nights, thought went no further. For the moment it sufficed to know one's self adored and adoring, to dream the impossible, to vision oneself untrammeled as Mollie, a virgin in bridal white standing meek-eyed before one's chosen.