r feet
and had swept round on him a face she must have turned away only to hide
the first rush of her pleasure.

For a while they shone on each other without speaking; then she sprang
to him and held out both hands.

"Is it true? Is it really true? Is it really going to happen to ME?"

He felt like answering: "You're the very creature to whom it was bound
to happen"; but the words had a double sense that made him wince, and
instead he caught her proffered hands and stood looking at her across
the length of her arms, without attempting to bend them or to draw
her closer. He wanted her to know how her words had moved him; but his
thoughts were blurred by the rush of the same emotion that possessed
her, and his own words came with an effort.

He ended by giving her back a laugh as frank as her own, and declaring,
as he dropped her hands: "All that and more too--you'll see!"

VIII

All day, since the late reluctant dawn, the rain had come down in
torrents. It streamed against Darrow's high-perched windows, reduced
their vast prospect of roofs and chimneys to a black oily huddle, and
filled the room with the drab twilight of an underground aquarium.

The streams descended with the regularity of a third day's rain, when
trimming and shuffling are over, and the weather has settled down to do
its worst. There were no variations of rhythm, no lyrical ups and downs:
the grey lines streaking the panes were as dense and uniform as a page
of unparagraphed narrative.

George Darrow had drawn his armchair to the fire. The time-table he
had been studying lay on the floor, and he sat staring with dull
acquiescence into the boundless blur of rain, which affected him like a
vast projection of his own state of mind. Then his eyes travelled slowly
about the room.

It was exactly ten days since his hurried unpacking had strewn it with
the contents of his portmanteaux. His brushes and razors were spread out
on the blotched marble of the chest of drawers. A stack of newspapers
had accumulated on the centre table under the "electrolier", and half a
dozen paper novels lay on the mantelpiece among cigar-cases and toilet
bottles; but these traces of his passage had made no mark on the
featureless dulness of the room, its look of being the makeshift setting
of innumerable transient collocations. There was something sardonic,
almost sinister, in its appearance of having deliberately "made up" for
its anonymous part, all in noncomm