ter ...

He was gone and Maggie really could not be sure what she had said.
Something very silly she could be certain. Stupid the pleasure that his
few words had given her, but she felt once again, as she had felt in
Katherine Mark's drawing-room, the contact with that other world, that
safe, happy, comfortable, assured world in which everything was exactly
what it seemed. She was glad that he liked her and that his sister
liked her. Then she could not be so wild and odd and uncivilised as she
often was afraid that she was. She rejoined Martin with a little added
glow in her cheeks.

"Who was that?" Martin asked her rather sharply.

She told him.

"One of those humbugging parsons," he said. "He stood over you as
though he'd like to eat you."

"Oh, I'm sure he's not a humbug," she answered.

"You'd be taken in by anybody," he told her.

"Oh, no, I shouldn't," she said. "Now forget him."

And they did. By the time they had reached Piccadilly Circus they were
once more deep, deep in one another. They were back in their dark and
gleaming wood.

The Lyric Theatre was their destination. Maggie drew a breath as they
stepped into the hall where there stood two large stout commissionaires
in blue uniforms, gold buttons, and white gloves. People pushed past
them and hurried down the stairs on either side as though a theatre
were a Nothing. Maggie stood there fingering her gloves and feeling
lonely. The oil painting of a beautiful lady with a row of shining
teeth faced her. There were also some palms and a hole in the wall with
a man behind it.

Soon they too passed down the stairs, curtains were drawn back, and
Maggie was sitting, quite suddenly, in a large desert of gold and red
plush, with emptiness on every side of it and a hungry-looking crowd of
people behind a wooden partition staring at her in such a way that she
felt as though she had no clothes on. She gave a hurried glance at
these people and turned round blushing.

"Why don't they sit with us?" she whispered to Martin.

"They're the Pit and we're the Stalls," he whispered to her, but that
comforted her very little.

"Won't people come and sit where we are?" she asked.

"Oh yes; we're early," he told her.

Soon she was more composed and happier. She sat very close to Martin,
her knee against his and his hand near to hers, just touching the
outside of her palm. Her ring sparkled and the three little pearls
smiled at her. As he breathed she breathed to