e stretched
forward over her.

"You love me? Yes?--Yes?" he said, in a voice that seemed like a
palpable contact on her.

"Yes," she whispered involuntarily, soulless, like a victim. He put
his arm round her, subtly, and lifted her.

"Yes," he re-echoed, almost mocking in his triumph. "Yes. Yes!" And
smiling, he kissed her, delicately, with a certain finesse of
knowledge. She moaned in spirit, in his arms, felt herself dead,
dead. And he kissed her with a finesse, a passionate finesse which
seemed like coals of fire on her head.

They heard footsteps. Miss Pinnegar was coming to look for her.
Ciccio set her down, looked long into her eyes, inscrutably,
smiling, and said:

"I come tomorrow."

With which he ducked and ran out of the yard, picking up his bicycle
like a feather, and, taking no notice of Miss Pinnegar, letting the
yard-door bang to behind him.

"Alvina!" said Miss Pinnegar.

But Alvina did not answer. She turned, slipped past, ran indoors and
upstairs to the little bare bedroom she had made her own. She locked
the door and kneeled down on the floor, bowing down her head to her
knees in a paroxysm on the floor. In a paroxysm--because she loved
him. She doubled herself up in a paroxysm on her knees on the
floor--because she loved him. It was far more like pain, like agony,
than like joy. She swayed herself to and fro in a paroxysm of
unbearable sensation, because she loved him.

Miss Pinnegar came and knocked at the door.

"Alvina! Alvina! Oh, you are there! Whatever are you doing? Aren't
you coming down to speak to your cousin?"

"Soon," said Alvina.

And taking a pillow from the bed, she crushed it against herself and
swayed herself unconsciously, in her orgasm of unbearable feeling.
Right in her bowels she felt it--the terrible, unbearable feeling.
How could she bear it.

She crouched over until she became still. A moment of stillness
seemed to cover her like sleep: an eternity of sleep in that one
second. Then she roused and got up. She went to the mirror, still,
evanescent, and tidied her hair, smoothed her face. She was so
still, so remote, she felt that nothing, nothing could ever touch
her.

And so she went downstairs, to that horrible cousin of her father's.
She seemed so intangible, remote and virginal, that her cousin and
Miss Pinnegar both failed to make anything of her. She answered
their questions simply, but did not talk. They talked to each other.
And at last the cousin we