eel as
one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling
dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went
home to bed. That was touching; Mrs. Hilary and Grandmama were touching.
Not Gerda and Kay, with their dance just beginning.

A bore, this sharing one bed. You couldn't sleep, however small and quiet
your companion lay. They must get a bed each, when they could, during
this tour. One must sleep. If one didn't one began to think. Every time
Nan forced herself to the edge of sleep, a picture sprang sharply before
her eyes--the flaming sky and sea, herself and Barry standing together on
the causeway.

"Aren't you glad you came?" Her own voice, soft, encouraging.

"I should say so!" The quick, matter-of-fact answer.

Then a pause and she turning on him the beginnings of a smile. An
allowing, inviting ... seductive ... smile.

And he, smiling too, but not at her, looking away to where Gerda and Kay
walked bare-legged to the Mount.

Flame scorched her again. The pause each time she saw it now became
longer, more deliberate, more inviting, more emptily unfilled. Her smile
became more luring, his more rejecting. As she saw it now, in the cruel,
distorting night, he had seen her permission and refused it. By day she
had known that simple Barry had seen nothing; by day she would know it
again. Between days are set nights of white, searing flame, two in a bed
so that one cannot sleep. Damn Gerda, lying there so calm and cool. It
had been a mistake to ask Gerda to come; if it hadn't been for Gerda they
wouldn't have been two in a bed.

"Barry's a good deal taken up with her just now," said Nan to herself,
putting it into plain, deliberate words, as was her habit with life's
situations. "He does get taken up with pretty girls, I suppose, when he's
thrown with them. All men do, if you come to that. For the moment he's
thinking about her, not about me. That's a bore. It will bore me to death
if it goes on.... I wonder how long it will go on? I wonder how soon
he'll want to make love to me again?"

Having thus expressed the position in clear words, Nan turned her mind
elsewhere. What do people think of when they are seeking sleep? It is
worse than no use to think of what one is writing; that wakes one up,
goads every brain-cell into unwholesome activity. No use thinking of
people; they are too interesting. Nor of sheep going through gates; they
tumble over one another and make one's