d her. She made that impossible for him; impossible to
forget that in her and all her shyness there was no art at all of
"cock-a-tree," only her fixed and funny determination not "to put upon
him."

And so the seeing home of Winny Dymond became a fascinating and
uncertain game, fascinating because of its uncertainty; it had all the
agitation and allurement of pursuit and capture; if she had wanted to
allure and agitate him, no art of "cock-a-tree" could have served her
better. He was determined to see Winny Dymond home.

And all the time it grew, it grew on him, that sense of tenderness and
absurdity. He found it--that ineffable and poignant quality--in
everything about her and in everything she did--in the gravity of her
deportment at the Poly.; in her shy essaying of the parallel bars; in
the incredible swiftness with which she ran before him in the Maze; in
the way her hair, tied up with an immense black bow in a door-knocker
plat, rose and fell forever on her shoulders as she ran. He found it in
the fact he had discovered that her companions called her by absurd and
tender names; Winky, and even Winks, they called her.

That was in the autumn of nineteen-one; and he was finding it all over
again now in the spring of nineteen-two.

At last, he didn't know how it happened, but one night, having caught up
with her after a hot chase, close by the railings of the Parish Church
in Wandsworth High Street, in the very moment of parting from her he
turned round and said, "Look here, Miss Dymond, you think I don't like
seeing you home, don't you?"

"To be sure I do. It must be a regular nuisance, night after night," she
answered.

"Well, it isn't," he said. "I like it. But look here--if you hate it--"

"Me?"

She said it with a simple, naive amazement.

"Yes, you."

He was almost brutal.

"But I don't. What an idea!"

"Well, if you don't, that settles it. Don't it?"

And it did.

CHAPTER III

It was the night of the Grand Display of the spring of nineteen-two.

To the Gymnasium of the London Polytechnic you ascended (in
nineteen-two) as to a temple by a flight of steps, and found yourself in
a great oblong room of white walls, with white pillars supporting the
gallery that ran all round it. The railing of the gallery was of iron
tracery, painted green, with a brass balustrade. The great clean white
space, the long ropes for the trapezes which hung from the ceiling and
were looped up now to the st