Mrs. Ransome for the first time in her life was thinking. She called it thinking, although that was no word for it, for its richness, its amplitude, its peculiar secret certainty. You might say that for the first time in her life Mrs. Ransome was fully conscious; that, with an extraordinary vividness and clarity she saw things, not as she believed and desired them to be, but as they were.

She saw, for the first time since Mr. Ransome's death, that she was happy; or rather, that she had been happy for more than two years, that is to say, ever since Mr. Ransome's death. And this vision of her happiness, of her iniquitous and disgraceful satisfaction, was shocking to Mrs. Ransome. She would have preferred to think that ever since Mr. Ransome's death she had been heartbroken.

But it was not so. Never in all her life had she been so at peace; never since her girlhood had she been so gay. This state of hers had lasted exactly two years and four months, thus clearly dating from her bereavement. For it was in May of nineteen-ten that he had died, and she was now in September nineteen-twelve.

She might not have been aware of it but that it, her happiness, had only six months more to run.

For two years and four months she had had her son Ranny to herself. She had been the mistress of his house, the little house that she loved, and the mother of his children whom (next to her son Ranny) she adored. For two years and four months she had made him comfortable with a comfort he had never dreamed of, which most certainly he had never known. With tenderness and care and vigilance unabridged and unremitted, she had brought Granville and Stanley and Dossie to perfection. It had not been so hard. Stanley and Dossie she had found almost perfect from the first, more perfect than Ranny she had found them, because they were not so near to her own flesh, and not loved so passionately as he.

And Granville, once far from perfect, had responded to treatment like a living thing. Maudie and Fred Booty had cherished it, they handed it on to Mrs. Ransome spotless and intact. Spotless and intact she had kept it. Spotless and intact no doubt it would be kept when, in six months' time, she in turn would hand it over to Winny Dymond, to Ranny's second wife.

He had only just told her.

That was what hurt her most, that she had only just been told, when for more than two years he had been thinking of it. It was no use saying that he couldn't have told her before, because he wasn't free. He wasn't free now; not properly, like a widower.

That he would, after all, get rid of poor Violet, who hadn't, in all those years, troubled him or done him any harm, that had been a blow to her. She hadn't believed it possible. She had thought the question of divorce had been settled once for all, five years ago, by his Uncle Randall. And John Randall in the meanwhile had justified his claim to be heard, and his right to settle things. He had canceled the debt that poor Fulleymore had owed him. To be sure, he could afford it. He was more prosperous and prominent than ever. He was, therefore, less than ever likely to approve of the divorce.

If the idea of divorce had been appalling five years ago, it was still more appalling now. Since, after all, poor Violet had removed herself so far and kept so quiet, the scandal of her original disappearance had somehow diminished with every year, while, proportionately, with every year, the scandal, the indecency, the horror of the Divorce Court had increased, until now it seemed to be a monstrous thing.

And that Ranny should have chosen this time of all times! When they'd paid off all the creditors and got clear, and stood respected and respectable again. As if his poor father's insolvency, which, after all, he couldn't help (since it was the Drug Stores that had ruined him), as if that wasn't enough disgrace for one family, he must needs go and rake up all that awful shame and trouble, after all these years, when everybody had forgotten that there had been any trouble and any shame.

That was what Mrs. Ransome found so hard to bear. And that she had been deceived; that he should have let her go on thinking that it wasn't possible, up to the last minute (it was Saturday and he was going to the lawyer on Monday), she who had the first right to be told.

All these years he had deceived her. All these years he had meant to do it the very minute he had got his rise.

For Ransome had attained the summit of his ambition. He was now a petty cashier with a pen all to himself at the top of the counting-house, and an income of two hundred a year. Short of making him assistant secretary (which was ridiculous) Woolridge's could do no more for him.

And Winny Dymond (Mrs. Ransome reflected bitterly), though he hadn't been free to speak to her, though he was practically (it didn't occur to Mrs. Ransome that what she meant was theoretically) a married man, Winny had known it all the time.

It was extraordinary, but Mrs. Ransome, who was really fond of Winny, felt toward her more acute and concentrated bitterness than she had felt toward Violet, whom she hated. She was able to think of Ranny's first wife as poor Violet, though Violet had made him miserable and destroyed his home and had left him and his children. And the thought of his marrying Winny Dymond was intolerable to Mrs. Ransome, though she had recognized her as the one woman Ranny ought to have married, the one woman worthy of him, and she would have continued to welcome her in that capacity as long as Ranny had refrained from marrying her.

For Ranny's mother knew that in Violet her motherhood had had no rival. Violet's passion for Ranny, Ranny's passion for Violet, had not robbed her of her son. Violet, not having in her one atom of natural feeling, and caring only for her husband's manhood and his physical perfection, had left to Mrs. Ransome all that was most dear to her in Ranny. Married to Violet, he was still dependent on his mother. He clung to her, he deferred to her judgment, he came to her for comfort. If he had been ill it was she and not Violet who would have nursed him. Whereas Winny would take all that away from her. She would take—she could not help taking—Ranny utterly away; not from malice, not from selfishness, not because she wanted to take him, but because she could not help it. She was so made as to be all in all to him, so made as to draw him to her all in all. There would be absolutely nothing of Ranny left over for his mother, except the affection he had always felt for her, which, for a woman of Mrs. Ransome's temperament, was the least thing that she claimed. Her instinct had divined Winny infallibly, not only as a wife to Ranny, but as a mother. A mother Winny was and would be to him far more than if she had used her womanhood to bear him children.

So that, without the smallest preparation, she saw herself required at six months' notice to give up her son. And while she blamed him for not having told her, she overlooked the fact that if she had been told she could not have borne the knowledge. It would have poisoned for her every day of the eight hundred and forty-five days for which in her ignorance she had been so happy.

She did not attempt to deny that she had been happy. But what she had said to Ranny when he told her was, "It's a mercy your poor father doesn't know."

And in that moment she thought of her happiness with a sharp pang as if it had been unfaithfulness to her dead husband.

It was at half past seven on a Saturday evening in the last week of September, nineteen-twelve, that Mrs. Randall sat alone in the back sitting-room at Granville and meditated miserably on those things.

Upstairs in his bedroom overhead she could hear Ranny moving very softly, for fear of waking Stanley. She knew what he was doing. He was changing, making himself smart enough to take Winny Dymond to the Earl's Court Exhibition.

Upstairs in his bedroom overhead, Ranny moved very softly, for fear of waking Stanley. He was changing into a new gray suit, making himself more smart than he had been for years to take Winny to the Earl's Court Exhibition.

In that shirt, glistening, high-collared, in a gray-blue tie, in gray-blue socks and brown boots, Ranny looked very smart indeed. And the suit, the suit looked splendid, the fold down the legs of the trousers being as yet unimpaired.

And Ranny looked young, ever so young still, though he was thirty-two. The faint lines at the corner of his eyes and of his mouth accentuated agreeably their upward tilt. He had gained distinction by the increasing firmness of his face. Virile in its adolescence, it had kept its youth in its maturity. Ranny's face expressed him. It was fine and clean; it had not one mean or faltering line in it. And his figure had not, after all, deteriorated. Flabbiness was as far from him as it had been in his youth.

With infinite precautions, Ranny opened a drawer where he found a small japanned tin box, very new. This he unlocked softly, and from a little canvas bag that lay in the compartment specially reserved for it he took a sovereign, one of four, that represented rather more than a week's proportion of his new salary.

He had made up his mind that when the day came he would spend no less a sum. So great a rise could not be celebrated on less. If a cashier of Woolridge's could have been capable of saving, say, one and ninepence out of that sovereign, the man who was engaged to Winny Dymond would have died rather.

Of course, it was a thundering lot to spend. But then Ranny desired, he was determined to spend a thundering lot. It was extravagant, but he wished to be extravagant. It was reckless, irresponsible, but reckless and irresponsible was what he felt. He meant to go it. He meant to have his fling just for once. And he meant that Winny, who had never had hers, nor any share in anybody else's, should taste, just for once, the rapture of a fling. She should have it for three solid hours of that delicious night, in one mad, flaming, stupendous orgy at the Earl's Court Exhibition.

For it wasn't really his rise that called for it. That was only a means to his divorce and marriage. It was his engagement that he proposed to celebrate.

The engagement, though he could hardly believe it, was a fact. True, it could not be made public until a decent interval after the divorce; but it had been acknowledged and settled between him and Winny as soon as ever he knew that he had got his rise. They would never celebrate it at all if they didn't celebrate it now before all the beastliness began.

For he knew perfectly well that it would be beastly. Winny would feel it even more than he did. She would feel it for him. Things that they had both forgotten would be raked up again, all the misery and all the shame. Now that it was imminent he dreaded the Divorce Court. His Uncle Randall could not have shrunk more painfully from this public washing of his dirty linen. He would come out of the Great Washhouse feeling almost, but not quite as unclean as if his linen had been kept at home and never washed at all.

And the trail of all that nastiness would spread over the six months of their engagement; it would poison everything.

He didn't mean to think about it or let Winny think. They were going to enjoy themselves to-night while they could, while they still felt innocent and clean and jolly.

He stooped for a moment over the crib where his little son lay curled and snuggling, his face hidden, his head, with its crop of dark hair, showing like the fur of some soft burrowing animal. He freed the little mouth muffled in bedclothes, and tucked the blankets closer. He picked up Stanny's Teddy bear that had fallen lamentably to the floor, and laid it where Stanny would find it beside him when he woke.

Treading softly, he went into the next room where Dossie lay in her own little bed beside his mother's, her little seven-year-old girl body stretched out in all its dainty slenderness (so unlike Stanny's. He saw with a pang of sudden passion the sweet difference). Her face, laid sideways in her golden-brown hair, showed already a fine edge, nose, and mouth and chin turned subtly, and carved out of their baby softness to the likeness of his own. He stooped and kissed Dossie's hair, and took without touching the sweetness of her mouth. Then he ran softly down the stairs.

His mother heard him running and came to the door of the room. "You're not going out like that," she said, "without an overcoat? It'll rain before you're back, I know, and that new suit'll be ruined."

"Rot! It can't rain on a night like this. Good night, Mother. Don't go sittin' up. I don't know when I'll be in."

"I'll hot some cocoa for you last thing and leave it on the trivet."

"Sha'n't want cocoa."

"What shall you want then?"

"Oh, Lord!" His nerves were all on edge. He couldn't bear it. "Nothing!" he cried, as he rushed out.

At the gate it struck him that he had been a brute to her. He turned. He rushed back to her. He put his arm round her and kissed her.

"You're all right now, aren't you?"

"Yes, Ran, dear, I'm all right." She smiled. "Run away and don't keep Winny waiting."

(Heaven only knew what it cost her.)

And Ranny looked back, laughing, through the doorway. "You know, Mother, it reelly is all right. And you're an angel."

And she said, "There! Go along with you."

He went.

"Ranny, how nice you look!"

Winny herself was looking nice and knew it. She wore a green cotton gown trimmed with white pipings, and a thing she called a Peggy hat that was half a bell and half a bonnet and had diminutive roses sewn on it here and there like buttons.

They were going down the long entrance to the Exhibition, between painted walls, in brilliant illumination, and in publicity that might have been trying if they had had eyes for anything except each other.

Winny's eyes were brimming with joy and tenderness as she looked at him. If she loved the new gray suit, the brown boots, and the Trilby hat, she did not love them more than the shabby blue serge with the place she knew in the lining where she had mended it. All the same, it was impossible to see him in such things without that little breathless thrill of wonder and excitement. There wasn't one man at Earl's Court that night who could compare with Ranny. He made them all look weedy, flabby; pitiful, uninteresting things.

And then, all of a sudden (they were at the paygate), as she looked, astonishment, grief, and anxiety appeared on Winny's face. Something had dismayed her tenderness, dashed her joy. She had seen Ranny take out of his waistcoat pocket gold—not ten shillings, but a whole sovereign. And a dreadful fear awoke in her.

He was going to spend it all.

She knew it, something told her; she could see by the way he smacked it down, careless like. And Winny couldn't bear it; she couldn't bear to think that Ranny, who had pinched and scraped and done without things for years, should go and throw away all that on her!

But anybody could see that he was going to do it, by the strange excitement and abstraction in his eyes, by the way he gathered up the change and took Winny by the arm and walked off with her. His eyes and the close crook of his arm drawing her along with him in his course, the slight leaning of his body toward hers as they went, his stride and the set of his head proclaimed that he had got her, that she couldn't escape, that he meant to go it, that he had the right to spend on her more than he could possibly afford.

She could see what he was thinking. In one tremendous burst he was going to make up to her now for all that she had missed. What was more, he was going to rub it into her that he had the right to. She couldn't realize their happiness as he did. They had been cheated out of it so long that she couldn't believe in it, couldn't believe that it was actually in their grasp, the shining, palpitating joy that for five years had been dangled before them only to be jerked out of their hands. He wanted to make her feel it; to make her taste and touch and handle the thing that seemed impossible and yet was certain.

Ranny was intoxicated, he was reckless with certainty.

And Winny couldn't bear it. All the way up between the painted walls she was trying to think what she could do to prevent his spending a whole sovereign. She knew that it was no use fighting Ranny. The more she hung on to him to stop him, the more Ranny would struggle and break loose. Persuasion was no good. The more she reasoned, the more determined he would be to spend that sovereign, and the more ways he would find to spend it.

It was to be one of those mortal combats between man's will and woman's wit. Winny meant to circumvent Ranny and to defeat him by guile.

And at first it looked as if it could be done easily. For at first the Exhibition seemed to be on Winny's side.

They had emerged from between the painted walls into Shakespeare's England, into the narrow, crooked streets under the queer old overhanging houses with the swinging signs—hundreds of years old Ranny said they were. And in the streets there were strange crowds, young men and young women who went shouting and singing and were marvelously and fantastically dressed. And they had glimpses through lattice windows of marvelous and fantastic merchandise. Marvelous and fantastic it seemed to Winny at first sight. But when she saw that it was just what they were selling in the shops to-day the delicious confusion in her mind heightened the effect of fantasy and of enchantment.

"I didn't think it would be like this," she said.

But why it was like that and why it was called Shakespeare's England, what on earth Shakespeare had to do with it, Winny couldn't think.

"Shakespeare? Why, he wrote books, didn't he?"

"Plays, Winky, plays."

"Plays then."

And when Ranny told her that it meant that England was like this in Shakespeare's time, hundreds of years ago, and reminded her that they had a scene from one of his plays on at the Coliseum the other day, Winny thought that only made it more marvelous and more like a dream than ever.

And she thought Ranny was more marvelous than ever, with the things he knew.

And then, having lured him into this tangled side issue, she began, as cool and offhand as you please. He gave her the opening when he asked her what she'd like to do next.

"This is good enough for me," she said.

For the most marvelous thing about Shakespeare's England was that you could walk about in it free of charge.

He looked at her almost as if he knew what she was up to.

"But you've seen it, Winky. You've seen all there is of it. You don't want to stay here all night, do you?"

He had her there, with his reminder of the hours they had to put in.

"Well"—she was lingering in the most natural manner, as if fascinated by the exterior of the Globe Theater. For she wished to spin out the time.

She saw Ranny's hand sliding toward his pocket.

"Would you like to go inside it?" he said.

"No, Ranny, dear, I wouldn't. At least, I'd rather not if you've no objection."

She spoke firmly, seriously, as if she knew something against the Globe Theater, as if the Globe Theater were disreputable or improper.

Then (it was wonderful how she contrived the little air of excited inspiration), "Tell you what," she said, "let's go and sit down somewhere and listen to the band. There's nothing I love so much as listening to a band."

She knew that they charged nothing for listening to the band.

It was a prompting from the Exhibition itself, proving, here again, that it was on her side, an entirely friendly and benignant power.

"All right," said Ranny. "That's in the Western Garden."

He took her by the arm and drew her, not to the Western Garden, but to a street (he seemed to know it by instinct) through which Shakespeare's England, iniquitously, treacherously, led them to their doom, the Water Chute.

For there the Exhibition threw off her mask and revealed herself as the dangerous Enchantress that she was. Hung with millions of electric bulbs, crowned and diademed, and laced with jewels of white flame, she signaled to them out of the mystery and immensity of the night. For a moment they were dumb, they stood still, as if they paused on the brink and struggled, protesting against this ravishing of their souls by the Exhibition. Straight in front of them, monstrous yet fragile, its substance withdrawn into the darkness, its form outlined delicately in beads of light, in brilliants, in crystals strung on invisible threads, the Water Chute reared itself like a stairway to the sky, arch above arch, peak above peak, diadem above diadem, tilted at a frightful pitch. Chains of light, slung like garlands from tall standards, ringed the long lake that stretched from their feet to the bottom of the stair. The water, dark as the sky, showed mystic and enchanted, bordered with trembling reeds of light.

From somewhere up in the sky, under the topmost diamonded arch, there came a rumbling and a rushing—

It thrilled them, agitated them.

And their youth rose up in them. They looked at each other, and their eyes, the eyes of their youth, shone with the same excitement and the same desire.

She knew that he had deceived her, that this was not the Western Garden, where the band played; she was aware that the Exhibition was not to be trusted either; that it was in league with him against her; that if she yielded to it they were lost. And yet she yielded. The deep and high enchantment was upon her. The Exhibition had her by the hair. She was borne on, breathless, unprotesting, to the white palings where the paygate was.

It was worth it. She had to own it. Never before had either of them tasted such ecstasy; from the precipitous climb in the truck that hauled them, up and up, to the head of the high diamonded stair; the brief, exciting passage along the gangway to the boat that waited for them, its prow positively overhanging the topmost edge, the sliding lip of danger, where the rails plunged shining to the blackness below; the race they had for the front seat where, Ranny said, they would get the best of it; and then—the downrush!

It was as if they had been shot, exulting, from the sky to the water, sitting close, sitting tight, linked together, each with an arm round the other's waist, and the hand that was free grasping the rail, their bodies bowed to the hurricane of their speed, with the rapture in their throats mounting and mounting, a towering, toppling climax of delight and fear, as the boat shot from the rails into the water and rose like a winged thing and leaped, urging to the heights that had sent it forth, and dropped, perilously again, with a shudder and a smack, once, twice; so tremendous was the impetus.

They heard young girls behind them scream for joy; but they were dumb, they were motionless; they drank rapture through set teeth; it went throbbing through them and thrilling, prolonging its brief life in exquisite reverberations.

And as if that wasn't enough, they went and did it all over again.

And Winny struggled; she tried to hold him back; she put forth all her innocent guile; she pitted her fragile charm against the stupendous magic of the Exhibition. She loitered, spellbound to all appearance, in the bazaar, before the streaming, shining booths that poured out their strange merchandise, Italian, French, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese.

"I don't want to do anything but walk about and look at things," she said. "Why, we might have traveled for years and not seen as much."

Winny seemed to be scoring points in the bazaar.

Then, before she knew where she was, Ranny, with all the power of the Exhibition at his back, had bought her a present, a little heart-shaped brooch made of Florentine turquoises.

That came of looking at things. She might have known it would.

"I'm tired of these shops," said Winny. "We shall be too late to hear anything of the band."

Thus she drew him to the Western Garden, so that for the moment she seemed to have it all in her own hands. For here there were more lights, and even more extravagant and fantastic display of electric jewelry, more garlands of diamond and crystal, illuminating, decorating everything. And there were rubies hanging in strange trees, and at their feet the glamour of light dissolved, half of it perished, gone from the world, drunk up by the earth, half living on where gray walks wound like paths in a dream, between rings of spectral green, islands of dimmed, mysterious red, so transformed, so unclothed and clothed again by glamour, as to be hardly discernible as beds of geraniums in grass.

Here they wandered for what seemed an eternity of bliss.

"What more do you want?" said Winny. "Isn't this beautiful enough for anybody?" Neither of them had any idea that the beauty and the glamour of it was in their own souls as they drank each other's mystery.

"Let's just sit and listen to the band," she said. And they sat and listened to it for another eternity, till Ranny became restless. For thirteen and eleven pence halfpenny was burning in his pocket.

The thought of it made him take her to a restaurant where they sat for quite a long time and drank coffee and ate ices. Winny submitted to the ices. They were delicious, and she enjoyed them without a shadow of misgiving. She was, in fact, triumphant, for she looked on ices as the close and crown of everything, and she calculated that out of that sovereign there would be exactly eleven and twopence halfpenny left.

"Well—it's been lovely. And now we must go home," she said.

"Go home? Not much. Why, we've only just begun." He looked at her. "D'you suppose I don't know what you're up to? You're jolly clever, but you can't take me in, Winky. Not for a single minute."

"Well, then, Ranny, let me pay for something." And she took out her little purse.

After that it was sheer headlong, shameful defeat for Winky. He had found her out, he had seen through her man[oe]uvers, and he and the Exhibition, the destructive and terrible Enchantress, had been laughing at her all the time. A delirious devil had entered into Ranny with the coffee and the ices, urging him to spend. And Winny ceased to struggle. He knew at what point she would yield, he knew what temptations would be irresistible. He got round her with the Alpine Ride; the Joy Wheel fairly undermined her moral being; and on the Crazy Bridge Ranny's delirious devil seized her and carried her away, reckless, into the Dragon's Gorge.

Emerging as it were from the very jaws of the Dragon, they careered arm in arm through the rest of the Exhibition, two rushing portents of youth and extravagance and laughter; till, as if the Enchantress had twisted her wand and whisked them there, they found themselves inside the palisades of the Igorrote Village.

A swarm of half-naked savages leaped at them.

It was Ranny who recovered first.

"It's all right, Winky. They're the Philippine Islanders."

"Well, I never—"

"Nor I. Talk of travelin'—"

But it was all very well to talk. The sight had sobered them. Gravely and silently they went through that village. At last, Ranny paused outside a hut no bigger than a dog-kennel. It bore the label: "Beda And His FiancÉe Kodpat Undergoing Trial Marriage."

Ranny laughed. "By Jove, that tickles me!" he said.

"What does it mean, Ranny?"

"Why, I suppose it means they try it first and if they don't like it they can chuck it."

"What an idea!"

"It's a rippin' good idea, Winky. Shows what a thunderin' lot of sense these simple savages have got. You bet they're not quite so simple as they seem. They know a thing or two. Why, they must be hundreds of years ahead of us in civilization, to have thought it all out like that. Think of it, that fellow Beda's had a better chance than me."

They turned away from Beda and Kodpat, and presently Winny stood entranced before the little house that contained Baby Francis (born in the Exhibition) and his mother. She looked so long at Baby Francis that Ranny couldn't bear it.

"Oh, look at him, Ranny! Isn't he a little lamb?" Winny's eyes were tender, and her face quivered with a little dreamy smile.

"D'you want to take him home and play with him? Shall I ask if he's for sale?"

"Oh, Ranny!"

She turned away. And he drew her arm in his. "You won't be happy till you've got him, Winky."

She said nothing to that; only her mouth, without her knowing it, kept for him its little dreamy smile.

"I believe," said Ranny, "you've never reelly got over Stanley's goin' into knickers."

"I love his knickers," she protested.

"Yes, but you'd love him better if he was that size, wouldn't you?"

"I couldn't love him better than I do, Ranny. You know I couldn't. And I wouldn't like him to be any different to what he is."

She was very serious, very earnest, almost as if she thought he'd really meant it.

Silent in the grip of an emotion too thick and close for utterance, they wandered back again to the enchanted garden where the band had played for them. The garden was silent, too. The bandstand was empty, black, unearthly as if haunted by some thin ghost of passionate sound; and empty, row after row of seats in the great parterre, except for a few couples who sat leaning to each other, hand in hand, finding a happy solitude in that twilight desolation.

Like worshipers strayed into some church, they joined this enraptured, oblivious company of devotees, choosing seats as far as possible from any other pair.

"Hadn't we better be going?"

They had sat there in silence, holding each other's hands. The excitement, the delirious devil in them, had spent itself, and under it they felt the heaving, dragging groundswell of their passion.

To Winny it had never come before like this. Up till now it had been enough simply to be with Ranny. Merely to look at him gave her profound and poignant pleasure. To touch him in those rare accidental contacts the adventure brought them, to feel the firm muscles of his arm under his coat sleeve, stopped her breath with a kind of awe and wonder, as if in Ranny's body thus discerned she came unaware upon some transcendent mystery.

Yet Winny knew now why, in what way, and with what terrible strength she loved him and he her. She loved him, primarily and supremely, for himself, for the simple fact that he was Ranny. She loved him also for his body, for his slenderness, and for his strong-clipping limbs, and she loved him for his face because it could not by any possibility be anybody else's.

And in her joy and tenderness, in their engagement and in the whole adventure, this going out with him and all the rare, shy contacts it occasioned, instalments of delight, windfalls of bliss that Heaven sent her to be going on with, in the very secrecy and mystery of it all, Winny felt that disturbing yet delicious sense of something iniquitous, something perilous, something, at any rate, unlawful. It was the same sense that she had known and enjoyed in the days when she went into the scullery at Granville to make beefsteak pies for Ranny; the same sense, but far more exquisite, far more exciting.

She did not connect it in any way with Violet. Violet had ceased to exist for them. Violet had of her own act annihilated herself. But Winny knew that until Ranny was divorced from his wife the law continued to regard him as married to her. So that, while firm land held and would always hold her, she was aware that he and she were walking on the brink, and that by the rule of the road Ranny went, so to speak, upon the outer edge where it was far more dangerous. She knew that he had more than once looked over; and she knew (though nothing would induce her to look) that the gulf was there, not far from her adventurous feet.

Still, it was wonderful how all these years they had kept their heads.

So she said: "Hadn't we better be going? I think we ought to."

She had unlaced her hand from his, and had turned in her seat to face him with her decision.

"Not yet."

"Well—soon. It's getting rather chilly, don't you think?"

At that he jumped up. "Are you cold, Winky?"

"My feet are, sitting."

"I forgot your little feet."

He raised her.

"It isn't late," he said. "We can walk about a bit."

They walked about, for he was very restless again.

"Wherever does that music come from?" Winny said.

Sounds came to them of violins and 'cellos, of trombones and clarinets, playing a gay measure, a dance, insistent, luring, irresistible.

They followed it.

In a vast room fronted by a latticed screen, all green and white, roofed by a green and white awning, and having a pattern of latticework, green and white, upon its inner walls, on a vast polished floor was a crowd of couples dancing to the music they had heard. It came loud through the open lattices, the insistent, luring, irresistible measure, violent now in solicitation, in appeal; and over it and under went the trailing, shuffling slur of the feet of the dancers and the delicate swish of women's gowns as they whirled.

Standing close outside, they could see into the hall through the lattices of the screen. They saw forty or fifty couples whirling slowly round and round to the irresistible measure; some were stiff and awkward, palpably shy; some with invincible propriety whirled upright and rigid, like toys wound up to whirl; some were abandoned to the measure with madness, with passion, with a corybantic joy. Here and there a girl leaned as if swooning in her lover's arms; her head hung back; her lower lip drooped; her face showed the looseness and blankness of a sensuous stupor. Other faces, staring, upraised, wore a look of exaltation and of ecstasy. All were superbly unaware.

Winny's face pressed closer and closer to the lattice. One of her little feet went tap-tapping on the gravel, beating the measure of the waltz. For at the sound of the music, at the sight of the locked and whirling couples, her memory revived; she heard again the beating of the measure old as time; she felt in her limbs the start and strain of the wild energy; and instinct, savage and shy, moved in the rhythm of her blood, and desire for the joy of the swift running, of the lacing arms and flying feet.

In her body she was standing outside the Dancing Saloon at the Earl's Court Exhibition, with her face pressed to the lattice; she was twenty-seven last birthday in her body; but in her soul she was seventeen, and she stood on the floor of the Polytechnic Gymnasium, beating time to the thud of the barbell. She was Winny of the short tunic and the knickers, and the long black stockings, and had her hair (tied by a great bow of ribbon) in a door-knocker plat.

"Oh, Ranny—" She looked at him with her shining eyes, half tender and half wild. "If we only could—"

Something gave way in him and dissolved, and he was weak as water when he looked at her.

The violins gave forth a penetrating, excruciating cry. And he felt in him the tumult evoked, long ago, one Sunday evening by the music in the Mission Church of St. Matthias's.

Only he knew now what it meant.

His voice went thick in his throat.

"I mustn't, Winky. I daren't. Some day—you and I—"

It was the supreme temptation of the great Enchantress; and they fled from it. The violins shrieked out and cried their yearning as they went.

A scud of rain lashed the carriage windows as their train shot out of the Underground at Walham Green. When they stepped out onto the platform at Southfields, the big drops leaped up at them.

"Well, I never," said Winny. "Who'd have thought it would have done that?"

They scuttled into shelter.

"It'll be a score for Mother. She said it would come, and I said it wouldn't."

"It'll ruin your new suit."

"And there won't be much left of your dress."

"My dress'll iron out again. It's me poor hat."

(The Peggy hat was not made for rain.)

"I'll take it off and pin it up in me skirt. It's you I'm thinking of."

She felt his coat to see what resistance it would offer to the rain. It offered none. It made no pretense about it.

"It'll be soaked, and it 'll never be the same again," she wailed.

But Ranny remained godlike in his calm. There was still one and sixpence of his sovereign left.

"You can keep your hat on. We're going to take a cab."

If he had said he was going to take an aeroplane she couldn't have been more amazed. It was only seven minutes' walk to Acacia Avenue. And it was not a common cab, it was Parker's fly that he was taking.

She surrendered because of the new suit.

"I can count the times I've ridden in a cab," she said. "This is the third. First time it was going to Father's funeral. Second time it was poor Mother's funeral. I've never been happy in a cab till now."

"Poor little girl! Next time it'll be coming from our wedding. Will you be happy then?"

"I'm so happy now, Ranny, that I can't believe it."

"It'll only be six months, or seven at the outside."

"Are you sure?"

"Certain."

The worst of the cab was that it cut short their moments.

It had been standing a whole minute before Johnson's side door. He sent it away.

For fifteen seconds, measured by hammer strokes of their hearts, they were alone. On the streaming doorstep, under the dripping eaves, he held her. He kissed her sweet face all wet with rain.

"Little Winky—little darling Winky." He pushed back her Peggy hat, and his voice lost itself in her hair.

"They're coming," she whispered.

There was a sound of footsteps and of a bolt drawn back. Somebody behind the door opened it just wide enough to let Winny through, then shut it on him.

It was intolerable, unthinkable, that she should disappear like that. Through a foot of space, in a hair's breadth of time, she had slipped from him.