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 him blazing splendidly in the night, yet so obscure that to hold his arm, as she held it, was only to touch the opaque substance surrounding the flame that roared upwards.

“Why nothing?” she asked hurriedly, in order that he might say more and so make more splendid, more red, more darkly intertwined with smoke this flame rushing upwards.

“What are you thinking of, Katharine?” he asked suspiciously, noticing her tone of dreaminess and the inapt words.

“I was thinking of you—yes, I swear it. Always of you, but you take such strange shapes in my mind. You’ve destroyed my loneliness. Am I to tell you how I see you? No, tell me—tell me from the beginning.”

Beginning with spasmodic words, he went on to speak more and more fluently, more and more passionately, feeling her leaning towards him, listening with wonder like a child, with gratitude, like a woman. She interrupted him gravely now and then.

“But it was foolish to stand outside and look at the windows. Suppose William hadn’t seen you. Would you have gone to bed?”

He capped her reproof with wonderment that a woman of her age could have stood in Kingsway looking at the traffic until she forgot.

“But it was then I first knew I loved you!” she exclaimed.

“Tell me from the beginning,” he begged her.

“No, I’m a person who can’t tell things,” she pleaded. “I shall say something ridiculous—something about flames—fires. No, I can’t tell you.”

But he persuaded her into a broken statement, beautiful to him, charged with extreme excitement as she spoke of the dark red fire, and the smoke twined round it, making him feel that he had stepped over the threshold into the faintly lit vastness of another mind, stirring with shapes,