faces, hands were waving vaguely, voices calling vaguely, here and
there one cheered; someone leaning far out started to sing: "If
auld acquaintance--" But Noel stood quite still in the shadow of the
milk-cans, her lips drawn in, her hands hard clenched in front of her;
and young Morland at his window gazed back at her.

2

How she came to be sitting in Trafalgar Square she did not know. Tears
had formed a mist between her and all that seething, summer-evening
crowd. Her eyes mechanically followed the wandering search-lights, those
new milky ways, quartering the heavens and leading nowhere. All was
wonderfully beautiful, the sky a deep dark blue, the moonlight whitening
the spire of St. Martin's, and everywhere endowing the great blacked-out
buildings with dream-life. Even the lions had come to life, and stared
out over this moonlit desert of little human figures too small to be
worth the stretching out of a paw. She sat there, aching dreadfully, as
if the longing of every bereaved heart in all the town had settled in
her. She felt it tonight a thousand times worse; for last night she had
been drugged on the new sensation of love triumphantly fulfilled. Now
she felt as if life had placed her in the corner of a huge silent room,
blown out the flame of joy, and locked the door. A little dry sob came
from her. The hay-fields and Cyril, with shirt unbuttoned at the neck,
pitching hay and gazing at her while she dabbled her fork in the thin
leavings. The bright river, and their boat grounded on the shallows, and
the swallows flitting over them. And that long dance, with the feel of
his hand between her shoulder-blades! Memories so sweet and sharp that
she almost cried out. She saw again their dark grassy courtyard in the
Abbey, and the white owl flying over them. The white owl! Flying there
again to-night, with no lovers on the grass below! She could only
picture Cyril now as a brown atom in that swirling brown flood of men,
flowing to a huge brown sea. Those cruel minutes on the platform, when
she had searched and searched the walking wood for her, one tree, seemed
to have burned themselves into her eyes. Cyril was lost, she could
not single him out, all blurred among those thousand other shapes. And
suddenly she thought: 'And I--I'm lost to him; he's never seen me at
home, never seen me in London; he won't be able to imagine me. It's
all in the past, only the past--for both of us. Is there anybody so
unhappy?' And the t