ealousy. But Sylvia was not strict in her conversation; she was,
indeed, exceptionally free. That might be a good sign. A girl who read
the Contes Drolatiques might easily read Rabelais himself, and a girl
who read Rabelais would be inviolable. Michael, when Sylvia had said
something particularly broad, used to look away from Lily; and yet he
knew he need not have bothered, for Lily was always outside the
conversation; always under a spell of silence and remoteness. Of what
was she forever thinking? There were looking-glasses upon the bronzy
walls.

For a fortnight Michael came every day to Tinderbox Lane and took the
girls out; but for the whole of that fortnight he never managed to be
alone with Lily. Then one day Sylvia was not there when he called. To
find Lily like this after a tantalizing fortnight was like being in a
room heavily perfumed with flowers. It seemed to stifle his initiative,
so that for a few minutes he sat coldly and awkwardly by the window.

"We're alone," he managed to say at last.

"Sylvia's gone to Brighton. She didn't want to go a bit."

"Bother Sylvia! Lily, we haven't kissed for five years."

He stumbled across to take her in his arms; and as he held her to him,
it was a rose falling to pieces, so did she melt upon his passion. He
heard her sigh; a coal slipped in the grate; the canary hopped from
perch to perch. These small sounds but wrapped him more closely in the
trance of silence.

"Lily, you will marry me, won't you? Very soon? At once?"

Michael was kneeling beside her chair, and she was looking down at him
from clouded eyes still passionate. Marriage was an intrusion upon the
remoteness where they brooded; and he, ravished by their flamy blue
relucency, could not care whether she answered him or not. This was such
a contentment of desire that the future with the visible shapes of
action it tried to display was unheeded, while now she stirred in his
arms. She was his, and so for an hour she stayed, immortal, and yet most
poignantly the prisoner of time. Michael, with all that he had dreaded
at the back of his mind he would have to face in her condition, scarcely
knew how to celebrate this reward of his tenacity. This tranquillity of
caresses, this slow fondling of her wrist were a lullaby to his fears.
It was the very rhapsody of his intention to kneel beside her, murmuring
huskily the little words of love. He would have married her wherever and
whatever he found her, but the re