ey plunged into Cheapside again, he
breasting the stream, making a passage for her. They found a favourite
confectioner's in St. Paul's Churchyard, where they had sometimes gone
before. He noticed that she took her seat with rather a weary air.

"Floss, you must come for a walk on the Embankment. You look as if you
didn't get out enough. Why will you go up and down in that abominable
underground? You're awfully white, you know."

"I never had a red face."

"Then what's the matter?"

"Nothing, I shall be better when I've had my tea."

She had her tea, which after a proper protest on her part was paid for
by Rickman. Then they turned into the cathedral gardens, where it was
still pleasant under the trees. Thus approached from the north-east,
the building rose up before them in detached incoherent masses, the
curve of its great dome broken by the line of the north transept seen
obliquely from below. It turned a forbidding face citywards, a face of
sallow stone blackened by immemorial grime, while the north-west
columns of the portico shone almost white against the nearer gloom.

"It's clever of it to look so beautiful," murmured Rickman, "when it's
so infernally ugly." He stood for a few minutes, lost in admiration of
its eccentricity. Thus interested, he was not aware that his own
expression had grown somewhat abstracted, impersonal and cold.

"I call that silly," said Flossie, looking at him out of the corner of
her black eyes. Had he come there to pay attention--to the Cathedral?

"Do you? Why?"

"Because--I suppose you wouldn't say I was beautiful if I were--well,
downright ugly?"

"I might, Flossie, if your ugliness was as characteristic, as
suggestive as this."

Flossie shrugged her shoulders (not, he thought, a pretty action in a
lady with so short a neck). To her St. Paul's was about as beautiful
as the Bank and infinitely less "suggestive." Mr. Rickman interpreted
her apathy as fatigue and looked about for a lonely seat. They found
one under the angle of the transept.

"Let's sit down here," he said; "better not exert ourselves violently
so soon after tea."

"For all the tea I've had, it wouldn't matter," said Flossie as if
resenting an ignoble implication. Rickman laughed a little
uncomfortably and blushed. Perhaps she had hardly given him the right
to concern himself with these intimate matters. Yet from the very
first his feeling for Flossie had shown itself in minute cares for her
physical wel