to stop it?'

'Very little,' said Betty.

'It's such a bore,' Tommy explained. (They had not accepted the fact
that their attitude towards the Venables could stand by itself,
unexplained by one to the other. Unnecessarily, absurdly, each for the
other's education piled bricks on the wall, with 'I'm busy,' or 'I'm
bored.')

Tommy jingled the coins in his pockets, and whistled sombrely through
his teeth.

'Venables been?' he said presently.

Betty's nod merely admitted the fact, without supplement or
amplification. Nor did she state the exact number of times that Venables
had 'been' during the past few days.

It seemed that they had now all been--all except Prudence Varley. The
inadequacy of the wall was manifest; it kept out nothing.

Tommy, catching as he looked up a certain pinched look about Betty's
lips, a strain of brows and forehead, a heaviness of lids, speculated
again as to the extent of her realization of the things which a girl
could not do; speculated also as to what, in the circumstances, would be
one's attitude towards Warren Venables. He deduced resentment, and a
desire for subsequent aloofness--a desire which might, perhaps, find
itself at combat with other things.... Such a combat would hardly be
pleasant; it would not conduce to restful nights. Betty did not look as
if her nights were restful.

So much, in a moment snatched from egoism, the boy saw of the girl--saw
uncertainly, with doubting divination, then returned upon himself, and,
to flee from that, said:

'Come out. We'll get hold of somebody and come up to Vomero. I want a
lark.'

The girl saw on the whole, perhaps, more of the boy. She saw, with tired
compassion, a good deal of him. She saw how he shunned things (the
facing of them had been forced on her, but not on him), yet how he too
would probably face them eventually. When he had faced them, they would
stand at the same point again; now she stood a little ahead. For she had
faced things; there had been no shunning allowed to her. She faced them
every day; she wondered in how many days she would be allowed to step
on and turn her back upon them. If it was to be very many, what Mrs.
Venables called the 'strain' might become rather oppressive.

As it happened, Tommy caught up Betty the next day, suddenly, and wholly
unexpectedly to himself. He lunched with a friend on the Vomero;
afterwards, being left by himself, he strolled through San Martino and
came out on the belvedere. P