e itself, mysteriously, while the thing lasted,
it precluded passion.

CHAPTER IV

Ransome left Winny Dymond at St. Ann's Terrace, and went home along the
High Street. He went very slowly, as if in thought.

At the railings of the Parish Church he paused, recalling something. Low
and square-towered, couchant in the moonlight behind its railings, the
Parish Church guarded under its long flank its huddled graves.

He smiled for very Youth. It was here that he had run Winny to earth and
caught her. The Parish Church had been his accomplice in that capture.

Wandsworth High Street twists and winds with the waywardness of a river.
The first turn brought him to the old stone bridge over the Wandle. On
the bridge before him, in the crook of the street, were the booths and
stalls of the night market, lit by blazing naphtha, color heaped on
color in a leaping, waving flare as of torches. On either side was a
twisted and jagged line of houses--brown-brick, flat-fronted,
eighteenth-century houses, and houses with painted fronts. Here a tall,
red-brick modern Parade shot up the gables of its insolent facade.
There, oldest of all, a yellow house stooped forward on the posts that
propped it. Somewhere up in the sky a tall chimney and a cupola. All
beautiful under the night, all dark or dim, with sudden flashes and
pallors and gleams, lamplit and moonlit; and all impressed upon
Ransome's brain with an extraordinary vividness and importance, as if he
had suddenly discovered something new about Wandsworth High Street.

What he had discovered was the blessedness of living as he did in
Wandsworth High Street within three minutes' walk of St. Ann's Terrace.

To be sure, what with the shop and the storage for drugs, Ransome's
father's house, with Ransome and his father and his mother and Mercier
and the maid in it, was somewhat cramped. And neither Ransome nor his
father nor his mother knew how beautiful it was with its brown-brick
front, its steep-pitched roof, and the two dormer windows looking down
on the High Street like two sleepy eyes under drooping lids. A narrow
slip of a house, it stood a foot or two back between the wine merchant's
and John Randall the draper's shop, and had the air of being squeezed
out of existence by them. Yet the name of Fulleymore Ransome, in gold
letters on a black ground, and with Pharmaceutical Chemist under it in a
scroll, more than held its own beside John Randall. The chemist's
dignity wa