hreshold as they had stood by the elm tree in the dark.

She closed her eyes, and his hold tightened. She called his name
thickly, "Ranny!" and suddenly it was as if his very nerves and the
strength of his knees dissolved and flowed like water, and drawing he
was drawn over the threshold.

* * * * *

"Don't worry about it, Ranny. It had got to be."

She said it, clinging to him with soft hands, as he parted from her. For
a moment she was moved beyond herself by his compunction, his passion of
tenderness for the helpless thing she seemed.

What would have surprised him if he could have thought about it was
that, above it all, above the tenderness and the compunction, he still
felt that triumphant sense of sanction and completion, of acquiescence
in an end foreappointed and foreseen.

But before he could think about it he was overtaken by an astounding, an
incredible drowsiness.

He dragged himself home to his attic and his bed, where, astoundingly,
incredibly, he slept.

CHAPTER XII

It was about nine o'clock of another Sunday evening a week later.

Winny Dymond was sitting on the edge of Violet's bed in the little back
room in St. Ann's Terrace. Violet, in a white petticoat and camisole,
overcome by the heat, lay stretched at length, like a drowsy animal, in
the hollow of the bed where she had flung herself. Her head, tilted
back, lay in the clasp of her hands. Her breasts, drawn upward by the
raised arms, left her all slender to the waist. The soft-folded, finely
indented crook of her elbows made a white frame for her flushed face.
She was looking at Winny with eyes narrowed to the slits of the sleepy,
half-shut lids.

In a thick, sweet voice, a voice too drowsy for anything beyond the bare
statement of the fact, she had been telling Winny that she was engaged
to be married to Mr. Ransome.

Now she was looking at Winny (all her intelligence narrowed to that
thread-fine glint of half-shut eyes), looking to see how Winny would
take it.

Winny took it with that blankness that leaves the brain naked to all
irrelevant impressions, and with a silence that made all her pulses
loud. She heard the rattle and roar of a distant tram and the clock
striking the hour in the room below. She saw the soiled lining and the
ugly warp of Violet's shoes kicked off and overturned beside the bed.
Beyond the shoes, a stain that had faded rose and became vivid on the
carpet. Then a film c