wever hard it was to leave Lily in her black dress, to leave in
the mirrors those hundred Lilies that drowsily were not forbidding him
to stay. Or when she stood under the portico sleepily resting in his
arms, it was difficult to let her turn back alone. How close were their
kisses wrapped in that velvet moonlessness! This was no London that he
knew, this scented city of Spring, this tropic gloom, this mad
innominate cavern that engorged them. The very stars were melting in the
water of the canal: the earth bedewed with fevers of the Spring was warm
as blood: why should he forsake her each night of this week? Yet every
midnight when the heavy clocks buzzed and clamored, Michael left her,
saying that May would come, and June, and another April, when she would
have been his a year.

The weather veered back in the second week of the fortnight to rawness
and wet. Yet it made no difference to Michael; for he was finding these
days spent with Lily so full of romance that weather was forgotten. They
could not walk in the garden and watch the swans: of nothing else did
the weather deprive him.

Two days before the marriage was to take place, Mrs. Fane arrived back
from the South of France. Michael was glad to see her, for he was so
deeply infatuated with Lily that his first emotion was of pleasure in
the thought of being able now to bring her to see his mother, and of
taking his mother to see her in Ararat House among those chandeliers and
mirrors.

"Why didn't you wire me to say you were coming?" he asked.

"I came because Stella wrote to me."

Michael frowned, and his mother went on:

"It wasn't very thoughtful of you to let me know about your marriage
through her. I think you might have managed to write to me about it
yourself."

Michael had been so much wrapped up in his arrangements, and apart from
them so utterly engrossed in his secluded life with Lily during the
past ten days, that it came upon him with a shock to realize that his
mother might be justified in thinking that he had treated her very
inconsiderately.

"I'm sorry. It was wrong of me," he admitted. "But life has been such a
whirl lately that I've somehow taken for granted the obvious courtesies.
Besides, Stella was so very unfair to Lily that it rather choked me off
taking anybody else into my confidence. And, mother, why do you begin on
the subject at once, before you've even taken your things off?"

She flung back her furs and regarded him tragic