nd before sitting on the
table she arranged her red skirts over her black legs with a
prodigious air of propriety. Poppy herself did not know whether this
meant that she wanted Ricky-ticky to think her nice, or whether she
wanted to think Ricky-ticky nice. After all, it came to the same
thing; for to Poppy the peculiar charm of Ricky-ticky was his
innocence.

The clock on St. Pancras church struck half-past eleven; in his
hanging cage in the front room, behind his yellow gauze curtain,
Poppy's canary woke out of his first sleep. He untucked his head from
under his wing and chirrupped drowsily.

"Oh, dicky," said Poppy, "it's time you were in your little bed!"

He did not take the hint. He was intent on certain movements of
Poppy's fingers and the tip of her tongue concerned in the making of
cigarettes.

He was gazing into her face as if it held for him the secret of the
world. And that look embarrassed her. It had all the assurance of age
and all the wonder of youth in it. Poppy's eyes were trained to look
out for danger signals in the eyes of boys, for Poppy, according to
those lights of hers, was honest. If she knew the secret of the world,
she would not have told it to Ricky-ticky; he was much too young. Men,
in Poppy's code of morality, were different. But this amazing,
dreamy, interrogative look was not the sort of thing that Poppy was
accustomed to, and for once in her life Poppy felt shy.

"I say, Rickets, there goes a quarter to twelve. _Did_ I wake him out
of his little sleep?"

Poppy talked as much to the canary as to Rickets, which made it all
quite proper. As for Rickman, he talked hardly at all.

"You'll have to go in ten minutes, Rick." And by way of softening this
announcement she gave him some champagne.

He had paid no attention to that hint either, being occupied with a
curious phenomenon. Though Poppy was, for her, most unusually
stationary, he found that it was making him slightly giddy to look at
her.

He was arriving at that moment of intoxication when things lose their
baldness and immobility, and the world begins to float like an
enchanted island in a beautiful blood-warm haze. Nothing could be more
agreeable than the first approaches of this blessed state; he
encouraged it, anticipating with ecstasy each stage in the mounting of
the illusion. For when he was sober he saw Poppy very much as she was;
but when he was drunk she became for him a being immaculate, divine.
He moved in a re