herself and him with her keen wit....

Gerda, looking up from her typewriter to say "How do you spell
comparatively?" saw his face in its momentary bitterness as he frowned,
pen in hand, out of the window. He was waiting to sign the letters
before he went out to a committee meeting, and she thought she was
annoying him by her slowness. She spelt comparatively anyhow, and with
the wholehearted wrongness to which she and the typewriter, both bad
spellers, often attained in conjunction, hastily finished and laid
the letters before him. Called back to work and actuality, Barry was
again cheerful and kind, and he smilingly corrected comparatively.

"You might ask me," he suggested, "instead of experimenting, when I do
happen to be at hand. Otherwise a dictionary, or Miss Pinner in the next
room...?"

Gerda was happy, now that the shadow was off his face. Raillery and
rebuke she did not mind; only the shadow, which fell coldly on her heart
too.

He left the office then for the day, as he often did, but it was warm and
alive with his presence, and she was doing his work, and she would see
him again in the morning.

6

Gerda went home only for week-ends now; it was too slow a journey to make
every morning and evening. She stayed during the week at a hotel called
the Red House, in Magpie Alley, off Bouverie Street. It was a hotel kept
by revolutionary souls exclusively for revolutionary souls. Gerda, who
had every right there, had gained admittance through friends of hers who
lodged there. Every evening at six o'clock she went back through the
rain, as she did this evening, and changed her wet clothes and sat down
to dinner, a meal which all the revolutionary souls ate together so that
it was sacramental, a breaking of common bread in token of a common
faith.

They were a friendly party. At one end of the table Aunt Phyllis
presided. Aunt Phyllis, who was really the aunt of only one young man,
kept this Red House. She was a fiery little revolutionary in the late
forties, small, and thin and darting, full of faith and fire. She was on
the staff of the British Bolshevist, and for the rest, wrote leaflets,
which showered from her as from trees in autumn gales. So did the Rev.
Anselm Digby. Mr. Digby had also the platform habit, he would go round
the country denouncing and inciting to revolution in the name of Christ
and of the Third International. Though grizzled, he belonged to the
League of Youth, as well as to many