, one washed yellow and the
other chalk-white. The river runs under brown walls, shaded on one side
by espalier limes, on the other over-hung with elder bushes in flower.
Lower down, on the banks, are willows and alders, and the wild hemlock
grows there, lifting up its great white whorls. Beyond the farther wall
and the limes there is a vast yard, stacked with timber; beyond the
banks a dock; and beyond all, on the great River, unseen, a distance of
crowded warehouses and gray wharves.

The elm tree, muffled in green, leans out over the stream as the
lightning bowed it long ago, propped by wooden stays, mutilated to the
merest torso of a tree. A sacred thing, the elm tree is inclosed and
guarded by a wooden railing as in a shrine.

Ransome was ten minutes too early, and it was impossible that she should
be there. Yet there she was, in her white dress, leaning up against the
wooden railing, as if swept and then left there in her detachment, so
inaccessible, so isolated was she, so unaware or so disdainful of the
couples, the young devotees of passion, who had made the elm tree their
meeting-place. She was there too soon, yet about her there was no air of
haste, but rather of brooding and delay. You would have said of her in
her stillness that she could afford to wait, she was so certain of her
end.

She scarcely stirred from her place to greet Ransome as he came. He
leaned up against the railing close beside her.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I tore like mad. Did you think I was never
coming?"

She smiled with a curious smile.

"No," she said. "I knew that you would come."

And they stayed there. (Some instinct had impelled him to call at the
shop, and leave his bicycle with Mercier. A bicycle was an encumbrance,
a thing inappropriate to the adventure.) They stayed while the couples,
the young devotees of passion, stood locked in each other's arms, or
moved away, slowly, like creatures in an enchantment, linked together,
and passed into the dusk. And in the end his hand sought and found hers,
secretly, behind the shelter of her gown, and they too passed, hand in
hand and slowly, like creatures in an enchantment; they were drawn into
the dusk, beyond the barrier at the Causeway, to the footpath by the
river.

When they returned to the elm tree it was all dark and secret there.
They stood as those others had stood, creatures of the enchantment,
locked, with hands on shoulders and faces looking close and seeing each
ot