wanting to go to church and likely to benefit
by going to church, but staying away because of feeling too shabby. But
you can't help seeing the rightness at the bottom of it--the idea of
presenting yourself decently at worship, as before princes. That makes
you laugh--"

"It doesn't, Marko. I can see much worse things just on the same
principle."

He said pleasedly, "Of course you can, can't you? Look at all this stuff
there's been in the papers lately about what they call the problem of
the unmarried mother. Now there's a brute of a case for you: a girl gets
into trouble and while she sticks to her baby she's made an outcast;
every door is shut to her; her own people will have nothing to do with
her; no one will take her in--so long as she's got the baby with her.
That's convention and you can imagine cases where it's cruel beyond
words. But it's no good cursing society about it. You can't help seeing
that the convention is fundamentally right and essential. Where on earth
would you be if girls with babies could find homes as easily as girls
without babies?" He smiled. "You'd have babies pouring out all over the
place. See it?"

She nodded. "I _do_ think that's interesting, Marko. I think that's most
awfully interesting. Yes, cruel and hateful and preposterous, many of
them, but all fundamentally right. I think that's _absorbing_. I shall
look out for conventions now, and when they annoy me most I'll think out
what they're based on. I will!"

"Well, it's not a bad idea," he said. "It helps in all sorts of ways to
think things out as they happen to you. You don't realise what a
mysterious business life is till you begin to do that; and once you
begin to feel the mysteriousness of it there's not much can upset you.
You get the feeling that you're part of an enormous, mysterious game,
and you just wonder what the last move means. Eh?"

She did not answer.

Presently she said, "Yes, you do still think things, Marko. You haven't
changed a bit, you know. You're just the same."

He smiled. "Oh, well, it's only two years, you know--less than two years
since you went away."

"I wasn't thinking of two years."

"How many years were you thinking of?"

"Ten."

They just sat there.

IX

The insistent shrieking of a motor siren in the street below began to
penetrate their silence. When it came to Sabre's consciousness he had
somehow the feeling that it had been going on a very long time. He
jumped to his feet. T