ean, the Combined Maze? What is it?"

Miss Usher was studying her programme.

The Combined Maze? That wasn't so easy to explain. But Ranny explained
it. It was, he said, a maze, because you ran it winding in and out like,
and combined, because men and women ran in it all mixed up together.
They made patterns accordin' as they ran, and the patterns were the plan
of the maze. You didn't see the plan. You didn't know it, unless you
were leader. You just followed.

"I see. Men and women together."

"Men and women together."

"Are you running in it?"

"Yes."

"Does Winny run in it?"

"Rather. We run together. You'll see how it's done."

Miss Usher thought she saw.

* * * * *

And they ran in it together, Ransome with Winny before him, turning from
him, parting from him, flying from him, and returning to him again.
Always with the same soft pad of her feet, the same swaying of her
sturdy, slender body, the same rising and falling on her shoulders of
her childish door-knocker plat.

Winny was a child; that was all that could be said of her; and he, he
was a man, grown up suddenly in a single night.

He ran, perfunctorily, through all the foolish turnings and windings of
the maze. He put his hands on Winny's waist to guide her when, in her
excitement, she went wrong. He linked his arm with hers when they ran
locked, shoulder to shoulder, in the Great Wheel; but it was as if he
held and caught, and was locked together with a child. Winny's charm was
gone; and with it gone the sense of tenderness and absurdity; gone the
magic and the madness of the running. For in Ranny's heart there was
another magic and another madness. And it was as if Life itself had
caught him and locked him with a woman in the whirling of its Great
Wheel.

CHAPTER IX

He haunted that door in the shutter more than ever in the hope of seeing
Violet Usher. Not that he wanted to haunt it. It was as if, set his feet
southward as he would, they were turned back irresistibly and drawn
eastward in the direction of the door.

There was nothing furtive and secret in his haunting. He had a right to
hang about Starker's, for he knew Miss Usher now. He had been formally
introduced to her by Winny as they left the Polytechnic together, on the
night of the Grand Display. Winny, preoccupied with her own performance
on the parallel bars, had remained unaware of their communion in the
gallery, and Violet Usher had