rnest, almost as if she thought he'd really
meant it.

Silent in the grip of an emotion too thick and close for utterance, they
wandered back again to the enchanted garden where the band had played
for them. The garden was silent, too. The bandstand was empty, black,
unearthly as if haunted by some thin ghost of passionate sound; and
empty, row after row of seats in the great parterre, except for a few
couples who sat leaning to each other, hand in hand, finding a happy
solitude in that twilight desolation.

Like worshipers strayed into some church, they joined this enraptured,
oblivious company of devotees, choosing seats as far as possible from
any other pair.

* * * * *

"Hadn't we better be going?"

They had sat there in silence, holding each other's hands. The
excitement, the delirious devil in them, had spent itself, and under it
they felt the heaving, dragging groundswell of their passion.

To Winny it had never come before like this. Up till now it had been
enough simply to be with Ranny. Merely to look at him gave her profound
and poignant pleasure. To touch him in those rare accidental contacts
the adventure brought them, to feel the firm muscles of his arm under
his coat sleeve, stopped her breath with a kind of awe and wonder, as if
in Ranny's body thus discerned she came unaware upon some transcendent
mystery.

Yet Winny knew now why, in what way, and with what terrible strength she
loved him and he her. She loved him, primarily and supremely, for
himself, for the simple fact that he was Ranny. She loved him also for
his body, for his slenderness, and for his strong-clipping limbs, and
she loved him for his face because it could not by any possibility be
anybody else's.

And in her joy and tenderness, in their engagement and in the whole
adventure, this going out with him and all the rare, shy contacts it
occasioned, instalments of delight, windfalls of bliss that Heaven sent
her to be going on with, in the very secrecy and mystery of it all,
Winny felt that disturbing yet delicious sense of something iniquitous,
something perilous, something, at any rate, unlawful. It was the same
sense that she had known and enjoyed in the days when she went into the
scullery at Granville to make beefsteak pies for Ranny; the same sense,
but far more exquisite, far more exciting.

She did not connect it in any way with Violet. Violet had ceased to
exist for them. Violet had of he