well. As he
pressed her closer to him, as he felt her lips suddenly strike through
the dark, find his check and then his mouth, as he felt her soft
confident hand find his and then close and fold inside it like a
flower, he wondered whether this once he might not force things to be
right. It was time he took things in hand. He could. He must ...

He began to whisper to her:

"Maggie darling ... It mayn't be bad. I'll find out where this other
woman is and she shall divorce me. I'll arrange it all. And we'll go
away somewhere where I can work, and we won't allow anybody to
interfere. After all, I'm older now. The mess I've been in before is
because I always make wrong shots ..."

His words ceased. Their hearts were beating too tumultuously together
for words to be possible. Maggie did not wish to speak, she could not.
She was mingled with him, her heart his, her lips his, her check his
... She did not believe that words would come even though she wished
for them. She was utterly happy--so utterly that she was, as it were,
numb with happiness. They murmured one another's names.

"Martin."

"Maggie! ..."

At last, dreaming, scarcely knowing what they did, like two children in
a dark wood, they wandered towards home.

CHAPTER VIII

PARADISE

Maggie had never really been happy before. She had of course not known
this; her adventures in introspection had been very few, besides she
had not known what happiness looked like; her father, her uncle, and
her aunts were not exactly happy people ...

Now she flung herself without thought or care into a flood of
happiness, and as sometimes occurs in life, she was granted by the
gods, beneficent or ironic as you please, a period of security when
everything menacing or dangerous withdrew and it seemed as though the
whole world were in a conspiracy to cheat her into confidence. She was
confident because she did not think; she simply did not think at all.
She loved Martin and Martin loved her; cased in that golden armour, she
confronted her aunts and the house and the world behind the house with
a sublime and happy confidence. She loved her aunts now, she loved
Martha and the parrot and the cat, and she could not believe that they
did not all love her. Because Martin loved her the rest of the world
must also do so, and if they did not she would compel them.

For three whole weeks the spell lasted, for three marvellous golden
weeks. When she looked back afterwards s