ou
know as well as I do that it's only since we began to throw off
superstition that we've begun to move. Or perhaps you don't want to
move--don't believe in progress."

"Progress towards what?" she flung back impetuously. "Perfection?
Some point where we'd have no poverty, no war, no ignorance, no death
even; where we'd all have every mortal thing we want? The millennium?
That's only another word for Hell. It's only by pretending that there
are things we want, and that we should be happy if we had them, that we
can believe in happiness at all. All this unrest, this sick despair
every morning of our lives when we drag ourselves out of bed and wonder
why we bother--it's just because we've begun to suspect that the
millennium is of no use to us. We've got to have more than that--some
sort of spiritual background--or cut our throats."

"Wild rhapsodizing, Francey. You don't know a thing."

"I don't. Nor do you. When I said I believed, I meant I hoped--I
trusted. And if there isn't a God at the end of it all, you people who
want to keep us alive for the sake of the knowledge you get out of us
will have to make one up."

Whereat, suddenly, in a cool, refreshing gust, their sense of humour
returned and blew them close to one another. They laughed and took
hands again--a little shyly, like lovers who had been parted for a long
time.

"What rot--our quarrelling over nothing at all," Robert said, "when
we've only got this hour together. I wanted to say 'I love you,
Francey--I love you, dear' over and over again. Say 'I love you too,
Robert.'"

"I love you too," she answered soberly.

But the crack was there--a mere fissure in the ground between them--a
place to be avoided even in their thoughts.

3

At night when his work was over and the unrest grew too strong to be
fought, he crept down the black, creaking stairs, through the sleeping
backwater of Drayton Mews, and out into the streets. He walked fast,
with his head down, guiltily, like a man flying from a crime. But in
the grave square where Francey Wilmot lived he slackened speed, and,
under the thick mantle of the trees, stood so still that he was only a
deeper shadow. Then release came. It was like gentle summer rain
falling on his fever. There was no one to see his weakness. He could
think and feel simply and naturally as a lover, without remorse.
Sometimes a light burnt in her window, and then he knew that she was
working, making up fo