admire disturbed her
greatly. He must not; it was not fair; he was too old--besides, the girl
had her boy; and she had taken care that he should know it. So, leaning
towards him, while a bare-shouldered young lady sang, she had whispered:

"Penny?"

And he had whispered back:

"Tell you afterwards."

That had comforted her. She would make him take her home. It was time
she showed her heart.

And now, in the cab, resolved to make her feelings known, in sudden
shyness she found it very difficult. Love, to which for quite three
years she had been a stranger, was come to life within her. The
knowledge was at once so sweet, and so disturbing, that she sat with face
averted, unable to turn the precious minutes to account. They arrived at
the flat without having done more than agree that the streets were dark,
and the moon bright. She got out with a sense of bewilderment, and said
rather desperately:

"You must come up and have a cigarette. It's quite early, still."

He went up.

"Wait just a minute," said Leila.

Sitting there with his drink and his cigarette, he stared at some
sunflowers in a bowl--Famille Rose--and waited just ten; smiling a
little, recalling the nose of the fairy princess, and the dainty way her
lips shaped the words she spoke. If she had not had that lucky young
devil of a soldier boy, one would have wanted to buckle her shoes, lay
one's coat in the mud for her, or whatever they did in fairytales. One
would have wanted--ah! what would one not have wanted! Hang that soldier
boy! Leila said he was twenty-two. By George! how old it made a man
feel who was rising forty, and tender on the off-fore! No fairy
princesses for him! Then a whiff of perfume came to his nostrils; and,
looking up, he saw Leila standing before him, in a long garment of dark
silk, whence her white arms peeped out.

"Another penny? Do you remember these things, Jimmy? The Malay women
used to wear them in Cape Town. You can't think what a relief it is to
get out of my slave's dress. Oh! I'm so sick of nursing! Jimmy, I want
to live again a little!"

The garment had taken fifteen years off her age, and a gardenia, just
where the silk crossed on her breast, seemed no whiter than her skin. He
wondered whimsically whether it had dropped to her out of the dark!

"Live?" he said. "Why! Don't you always?"

She raised her hands so that the dark silk fell, back from the whole
length of those white arms.