again and followed the road beside the river towards
the old Abbey Church, that Lantern of the West. Away in some sunken
gardens ahead of them a band was playing, and a cluster of little lights
about the bandstand showed a crowd of people down below dancing on the
grass. These little lights, these bobbing black heads and the lilting
music, this little inflamed Centre of throbbing sounds and ruddy
illumination, made the dome of the moonlit world about it seem very vast
and cool and silent. Our visitors began to realize that Bath could
be very beautiful. They went to the parapet above the river and stood
there, leaning over it elbow to elbow and smoking cigarettes. Miss
Grammont was moved to declare the Pulteney Bridge, with its noble arch,
its effect of height over the swirling river, and the cluster of houses
above, more beautiful than the Ponte Vecchio at Florence. Down below was
a man in waders with a fishing-rod going to and fro along the foaming
weir, and a couple of boys paddled a boat against the rush of the water
lower down the stream.

"Dear England!" said Miss Grammont, surveying this gracious spectacle.
"How full it is of homely and lovely and kindly things!"

"It is the home we come from."

"You belong to it still."

"No more than you do. I belong to a big overworking modern place called
London which stretches its tentacles all over the world. I am as much a
home-coming tourist as you are. Most of this western country I am seeing
for the first time."

She said nothing for a space. "I've not a word to say to-night," she
said. "I'm just full of a sort of animal satisfaction in being close to
you.... And in being with you among lovely things.... Somewhere--Before
we part to-night--...."

"Yes?" he said to her pause, and his face came very near to hers.

"I want you to kiss me."

"Yes," he said awkwardly, glancing over his shoulder, acutely aware of
the promenaders passing close to them.

"It's a promise?"

"Yes."

Very timidly and guiltily his hand sought hers beside it and gripped it
and pressed it. "My dear!" he whispered, tritest and most unavoidable
of expressions. It was not very like Man and Woman loving upon their
Planet; it was much more like the shy endearments of the shop boys and
work girls who made the darkling populous about them with their silent
interchanges.

"There are a thousand things I want to talk about to you," she said.
"After we have parted to-morrow I shall begin to think