r,
exhausted by her unusual moral effort, and too deeply hurt to return the
smile which Audrey flashed back at her, by way of apology, as she flew.

The bitter little dialogue, at any rate, had the good effect of wakening
Audrey to the practical aspects of her problem. Before their engagement
could be announced, it was clear that Ted ought to be properly
introduced to her friends. However she might affect to brave it out,
Audrey was sensitive to the least breath of unfavourable opinion, and
she did not want it said that she had picked up her husband heavens
knows how, when, and where. If they had been talked about already, no
time should be lost before people realised that Ted was a genius with a
future before him, his sister a rising artist also, and so on. Audrey
was busy with these thoughts as she was being rowed up the river from
Hammersmith. At Kew the room where they had tea was full of people she
knew; and as she and Ted passed on to a table in a far corner, she felt,
rather than saw, that the men looked after them, and the women exchanged
glances. The same thing happened at Richmond, where they dined; and
there a little knot of people gathered about the river's bank and
watched their departure with more than friendly interest. If she had any
lingering doubts before, Audrey was ready now to make her engagement
known, for mere prudence' sake. And as they almost drifted down in the
quiet July evening, between the humid after-glow of the sunset and the
dawn of the moonlit night, Audrey felt a wholly new and delicate
sensation. It was as if she were penetrated for the first time by the
indefinable, tender influences of air and moonlight and running water.
The mood was vague and momentary--a mere fugitive reflection of the
rapture with which Ted, rowing lazily now with the current, drank in the
glory of life, and felt the heart of all nature beating with his. Yet
for that one instant, transient as it was, Audrey's decision was being
shaped for her by a motive finer than all prudence, stronger than all
sense of propriety. In its temporary transfiguration her love for Ted
was such that she would have been ready, if need were, to fix Siberia
for their honeymoon and to-morrow for their wedding-day. As they parted
on her doorstep at Chelsea, between ten and eleven o'clock, she
whispered, "Ted, that row down was like heaven! I've never, never been
so happy in all my life!" If she did not fix their wedding-day then and
there