d of leaving the sky suddenly grey as it usually was after the
rapid twilight. The sundown bugle called down the flag on the masthead
of the flagship, and the headlights twinkled out. Marcella and Louis
grew very quiet as the streets quietened and only an occasional car
clanged by in George Street, an occasional band of singing sailors went
back rollicking down the street, a solitary ferry glided along in the
water, with brilliant reflections and blaring German band. She crept a
little closer to him; when he did not speak she forgot, for the while,
the chasm between them. It is so easy not to criticize anything seen
through veils of glamour. People socially, spiritually and mentally
worlds apart can love violently for a while when there is physical
attraction. And they are very happy, breathlessly, feverishly happy.
Then they wake up with a memory of mutual giving-way that embitters and
humiliates when the inevitable longing for something more stable than
softness and breathlessness sets in.

Louis had not been drunk for three weeks; so many things had happened to
her, new things, charming things, adorable things and sad things since
they left the ship that she had almost sponged the memory of it from her
mind. The faculty that had been forced upon her in self defence during
her childhood, of forgetting hunger, hardness and repression the moment
she left the house and got out on to the wild hillside in the sun and
the wind came to her now with a kind of rapture. She had never, in her
childhood, dared to resent anything that hurt herself. This spirit of
non-resentment had become a habit of mind with her. She forgot--if she
ever realized--that Louis had hurt her, in the soft beauty of the
aurora, the silent fall of the night, the exhilaration of the roof with
its loneliness, its romance.

After awhile she went down the ladder and brought up grapes and
granadillas, and four candles. Louis looked disappointed: he would have
preferred mutton for supper, but for once said nothing as she stuck two
candles on the coping and two at the foot of the mattress, and lighted
them. They burnt unnickering in the windless, blue air.

It was the setting of romance. Dreams, play-acting came back. Breaking
off a bunch of grapes for Louis she said:

"This is a roof garden in Babylon. You're a king. Oh no, it's Jerusalem.
I'm Bethsaibe, bathing on the roof and you're King David. You've got to
fall in love with me."

Louis was too self-ce