ed to close and shrink to a thin sharp bud. It closed and
opened again, it grew nearer and bigger, it bent forward and put out
its mouth (for it had a mouth, this extraordinary flower) and kissed
him.

"I sy, it's nearly one o'clock," said she. "You've got to clear out of
this. Come!"

She rose; she stood before him holding out her hands to help him to
get up and go. She laughed again. She laughed wide-mouthed, her head
flung back, her face foreshortened, her white throat swelled and
quivering--the abandoned figure of Low Comedy incarnate. But that was
not what he saw.

To him it was as if the dark, impenetrable world had suddenly
unfolded, had blossomed and flowered in the rose of her mouth; as if
all the roses of all the world went to make up the petals of that
rose. Her body was nothing but a shining, transparent vessel for the
fire of life. It ran over; it leapt from her; the hands she stretched
out to him were two shallow lamps that could hardly hold the tall,
upward shooting, wind-tortured splendour of the flame.

He rose unsteadily to his feet. The movement, being somewhat
complicated, brought him within a yard of his own figure as presented
in one of the long mirrors. He stood there, arrested, fascinated,
shocked by that person in the mirror. The face he was accustomed to
see in mirrors was grave, and not high coloured, and it always kept
its mouth shut. This person's face was very red, and his mouth was
slightly open, a detail he noticed with a peculiar disgust. He could
not get away from it, either. It was held there, illuminated, insisted
on, repeated for ever and ever, smaller and smaller, an endless
procession of faces, all animated by one frenzy and one flame. He was
appalled by this mysterious multiplication of his person, and by the
flushed and brilliant infamy of his face. The face was the worst; he
thought he had never seen anything so detestable as the face. He sat
down and hid it in his hands.

"Poor Rickets," said Poppy softly. She drew his hands from his face by
a finger at a time.

"Oh, Ricky-ticky, you are such a rum little fellow. I suppose that's
why I like you. But for the life of me I can't think why I kissed you;
unless it was to say Good-night."

A kiss more or less was nothing to Poppy. And that one, she felt, had
been valedictory. She had kissed, not Ricky-ticky, but his dying
Innocence, the boy in him. And she had really wanted him to go.

The house was stiller than ever. The