e singing birds would fly out
of woods and perch on the rigging, and brown men would come and run
aloft and wreathe the masts with flowers, and shy women with long,
loose, black hair would steal out and offer palm-wine in conches, while
he smiled aloofly and was gracious. It would not matter where he sailed;
at no port in the world would sorrow wait for him, and everywhere there
would be pride and honour and stars pinned to his rough coat by grateful
kings. And if he fell in love with a beautiful woman he would go away
from her at once and do splendid things for her sake. And when he died
there would be a lying-in-state in a great cathedral, where emperors and
princes would file past and shiver as they looked on the white, stern
face and the stiff hands clasped on the hilt of his sword, because now
they had lost their chief defender. Oh, he was too grand to be known, of
course, but it was a joy to think of him.

She looked across the hall at him. Their eyes met.

III

There had mounted in him, as he rode through the damp night on his
motor-cycle, such an inexplicable and intense exhilaration, that this
ugly hall which was at the end of his journey, with its stone corridors
in which a stream of people wearing mackintoshes and carrying umbrellas
made sad, noises with their feet, seemed an anti-climax. It was absurd;
that he should feel like that, for he had known quite well why he was
coming into Edinburgh and what a Suffrage meeting would be like. But he
was angry and discontented, and impatient that no deflecting adventure
had crossed his path, until he arrived at the door which led to the
half-crown seats and saw across the hall that girl called Ellen
Melville. The coarse light deadened the brilliance of her hair, so that
it might have been but a brightly coloured tam-o'-shanter she was
wearing; and now that that obvious beauty was not there to hypnotise the
eye the subtler beauty of her face and body got its chance. "I had
remembered her all wrong," he said to himself. "I was thinking of her as
a little girl, but she's a beautiful and dignified woman." And yet her
profile, which showed against the dark pillar at which she stood, was
very round and young and surprised, and altogether much more infantile
than the proud full face which she turned on the world. There was
something about her, too, which he could not identify, which made him
feel the sharp yet almost anguished delight that is caused by the
spectacle of