n a few seconds. "I didn't know. I know
Paradise Walk. It's that horrid little passage down there on the right."

She had not the historic sense; and she did not understand his mood, did
not in the slightest degree suspect that events had been whipping his
ambition once more, and that at that moment he was enjoying the
seventeenth and even the sixteenth centuries, and thinking of Sir Thomas
More and Miss More, and all manner of grandiose personages and abodes,
and rebelling obstinately against the fact, that he was as yet a
nonentity in Chelsea, whereas he meant in the end to yield to nobody in
distinction and renown. He knew that she did not understand, and he
would not pretend to himself that she did. There was no reason why she
should understand. He did not particularly want her to understand.

"Let's have a look at the river, shall we?" he suggested, and they moved
towards Cheyne Walk.

"Dearest," she said, "you must come and have breakfast at the studio
to-morrow morning. I shall get it myself."

"But Agg won't like me poking my nose in for breakfast."

"You great silly! Don't you know she simply adores you?"

He was certainly startled by this remark, and he began to like Agg.

"Old Agg! Not she!" he protested, pleased, but a little embarrassed.
"Will she be up?"

"You'll see whether she'll be up or not. Nine o'clock's the time, isn't
it?"

They reached the gardens of Cheyne Walk. Three bridges hung their double
chaplets of lights over the dark river. On the southern shore the shapes
of high trees waved mysteriously above the withdrawn woodland glades
that in daytime were Battersea Park. Here and there a tiny red gleam
gave warning that a pier jutted out into the stream; but nothing moved
on the water. The wind that swept clean the pavements had unclouded ten
million stars. It was a wind unlike any other wind that ever blew, at
once caressing and roughly challenging. The two, putting it behind them,
faced eastward, and began to pass one by one the innumerable ornate
gas-lamps of Chelsea Embankment, which stretched absolutely rectilinear
in front of them for a clear mile. No soul but themselves was afoot. But
on the left rose gigantic and splendid houses, palaces designed by
modern architects, vying with almost any houses in London, some dark,
others richly illuminated and full of souls luxurious, successful, and
dominant. As the girl talked creatively about the breakfast, her arm
pressed his, and his fing