eiling flung
anywhere, like a box of toy bricks put carelessly away. The bed, to
Jenny's enormous diversion, was buried in a deep alcove.

"Whoever heard?" she asked.

"We'll be all to ourselves," said Valerie in her deep voice; and Jenny
felt a thrill at the idea of lying snug in the alcove with Valerie's
warm arm about her.

The sitting-room looked a very different place when the four girls had
scattered over it their various belongings, when they had flung all the
antimacassars into the corner in a cold white heap, when they had stuck
a fan-shaped line of photographs round the mirror over the
mantelpiece--photographs of fluffy-haired girls in gay dancing
attitudes, usually inscribed "Yours sincerely Lottie, or Amy, or Madge,
or Violet."

When she had pulled off most of the blobs on the valance of the
mantelpiece and examined all the photographs, Jenny sat down on the
white rabbit-skin rug with her back to the high iron fender and looked
at her companions--at Winnie sprawling over a shining leather arm-chair,
twisting one of the buttons that starred its round back, while she read
"Will He Remember?"; at Eileen, writing home to Camberwell; at Valerie,
as deep in a horse-hair sofa as the shape of it allowed, smoking a
cigarette. She thought, while she sat there in the warmth and quiet, how
jolly it was to be quit of the eternal sameness of Hagworth Street. She
almost felt that Islington no longer existed, as if up here in this
Glasgow flat she were in a new world.

"This is nice," she said. "Give us a cigarette, Val, there's a duck."

Bedtime came not at any fixed boring moment, but suddenly, with all the
rapture of an inspiration. Bedtime came with Valerie taking, it seemed,
hours to undress as she wandered round the room in a maze of white lace
and pink ribbons. Jenny lay buried in the deep feather bed, watching her
shadow on the crooked ceiling, following with drowsy glances the shadowy
combing of what, in reflection, seemed an absolute waterfall of hair.

Then suddenly Valerie blew out the candlelight.

"Oo-er!" cried Jenny. "We aren't going to sleep in the dark?"

"Of course we are, kiddie," said Valerie; and somehow darkness did not
matter when Jenny could sail off into sleep clasping Valerie's soft hot
hand.

Gray morning came with the stillness of Sunday in Glasgow, with
raindrops pattering against the window in gusts of wind, with Mrs.
McMeikan and breakfast on a tray.

"This is grand, isn't it?"