her's eyes large and strange in the darkness.

Over Wandsworth Plain came the sound of the Parish Church clock striking
ten.

When they reached St. Ann's Terrace the little brown house where Violet
lodged was shut up, asleep behind drawn blinds.

Violet could let herself in. She had a key. At least, she thought she
had. She could have been almost sure she had brought it. But no, it was
not in her purse, nor yet in her pocket. She turned the pocket inside
out and shook it, and there was no key. Oh, dear, she was afraid she had
lost it, or else--perhaps--she hadn't brought it after all. She was that
careless. She thought she must have left it in her room on the
dressing-table.

They knocked three times, and nobody answered. Nobody was there. They
had all gone out early in the evening, and evidently they had not come
back. Sometimes, Violet said, they weren't back till eleven or past it.

Well, she didn't want to stand out there much longer. She wondered how
she was ever going to get in.

They looked at each other and laughed at their helplessness. There is
always something funny about being locked out. Ranny said, "What a
lark!"

Then he thought of the window.

It was low. He stepped on to the ledge, and stood there. He slipped the
latch with the blade of his pocket knife. He raised the sash and dropped
into the room. He groped about in it till he found his way into the
passage and opened the door and let Violet in.

She said she was all right now. Her candle would be left there for her,
on the shelf. But it wasn't, and Violet didn't like the dark. She was
afraid of it. So Ranny lit a match. He lit several matches and lighted
her all the way up the narrow staircase to the door of her little
bedroom at the back. She took the matches from him and went in to look
for the candle, leaving the door ajar and Ranny standing outside it on
the mat.

He heard her soft feet moving about the room; he heard the spurt of the
matches, and her little smothered cry of impatience as they went out one
by one. It seemed ages to Ranny as he waited.

At last she found the candle and lit it and set it down somewhere where
it was hidden behind the door.

And then she came to him with her eyes all shining in the dusk.

She filled the half-opened doorway; and round and about her and in the
room beyond there hung, indescribable but perceptible, palpable almost
as a touch, the thick scent of her hair. And they stood together on the
t