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.

"I haven't lived for two years. Oh, Jimmy! Help me to live a little!
Life's so short, now."

Her eyes disturbed him, strained and pathetic; the sight of her arms;
the scent of the flower disturbed him; he felt his cheeks growing warm,
and looked down.

She slipped suddenly forward on to her knees at his feet, took his hand,
pressed it with both of hers, and murmured:

"Love me a little! What else is there? Oh! Jimmy, what else is there?"

And with the scent of the flower, crushed by their hands, stirring his
senses, Fort thought: 'Ah, what else is there, in these forsaken days?'

To Jimmy Fort, who had a sense of humour, and was in some sort a
philosopher, the haphazard way life settled things seldom failed to seem
amusing. But when he walked away from Leila's he was pensive. She was
a