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248 see. What a heavenly night! Where has everybody gone? We seem to be left friendless and alone, you and I."

Lucia knew what she was doing. Though she spoke with her light, quick voice, she was aware that her words would have a double edge for him. Then she heard a sudden little creak from his shirt, as if he had drawn a breath rapidly.

"Yes, quite alone," he said. "Maud upstairs, the deserted wife and the deserted husband here, and the rest of them"

She laughed.

"What a discreet pause!" she said. "So discreet that you really must go on. What are the rest of them doing?"

"Oh, making love, I suppose," he said impatiently in a voice that Lucia hardly knew. There was revolt in it, rebellion and—envy.

The light from the open windows of the drawing-room shone out very clearly on to them, illuminating his figure, as he stood there, tall, eager-eyed, unconscious of himself, but very vividly conscious of her. And Lucia knew that she was playing with fire, knew also that she was running the usual risk of those who do such things. But she told herself that she had not been in the least burned yet; the fire was only delightfully warm. And she took a couple of steps out of the square of illumination into the dusk, drawing him with her.

"And why not?" said she. "Surely everybody who is at all alive is making love all the time to something or somebody, to an idea if not to a person. The moment you cease to be in love you cease to live. And the worst of it is that you have to go on living just the same."

"Yes, that is damnably bad," he said.

There was a sudden fierceness about this which enchanted her. The heart of the man had suddenly leapt into light, and Lucia wanted but little intuition to guess from that how fierce a struggle was going on within him. It was dramatic; it was one of the wonderful ironies of life that things should happen like this. If it had been anyone else, the husband of a stranger, of an acquaintance, it would be the stale old triangle over again. But about this there was something biting; the scene was luridly lit.

That flashed in and out of her brain in a second, and it was left filled with the reality of what was happening, not with tha sense of its artistic interest. And it was more than the mere reality of it that made her raise her eyes to him, that drew her a step nearer him, that made her mouth tremble for a moment; it was