Part 2 — WOBURN PLACE (continued 2)

I had not looked at Evie. I do not think she knew she had drawn a little closer to me. Other listeners had been attracted by the melody, but we stood in a shadow, near a rill that fell into the mere. The water was nacre; the moon's sickle in it was a thin blade of amethyst; and I thrilled unspeakably as the bird's song changed without warning to long, low, caressing notes that drew the heart out of me as the nectar-bag of a floret is drawn from a flower. I heard Evie's slow sob.

Oh, might I but have crushed out that other nectar, to transmute into honey of our own!

Suddenly Evie flung herself on my breast, sobbing and strangling. Her fingers worked at the lapel of my collar; by bending my head I could have touched her small white knuckles with my lips. I was conscious that in my efforts not to do this I bared my teeth like a dog, but I remembered in time that to snatch was to lose. It was not my bosom against which her bosom heaved—it was the nearest sentient resting-place on which she could lay it. Her unhappiness and her happiness, her dream and her disillusion, her knowledge and her already failing hopes, rushed together in her sobs. Her love of a wastrel and her love for all he was a wastrel, and that hidden and sacred nook from which Louie Causton had ruthlessly ripped the curtain—for the pure strangeness of these things her tears gushed forth. I felt the long heave of her body.

"Come, come, my dear!" I said, with an infinitude of tender encouragement, close to her ear.

"Oh—oh—oh!" she sobbed.

"Dear, dear girl!" I murmured, passing my arm about her to support her.

But at that moment I could no more have said or done more than this than I could have sued for a favour by the bier of a scarce-cold lover.

"Hush, poor child!" I whispered, patting her shoulder. "Come, let's go. Let's leave that dreadful bird."

"Just a—mi—mi—minute——" she quavered. "I—I—love it—and I can't bear it——"

Even so did I love, and yet could scarce bear to hold the tender form in my arms.

Presently we left the mere, mounted the dark lane, and began to cross the common. Her hand was now on my sleeve, and it did not leave it again. Once her fingers made an impulsive little pressure on it, which, I cried sternly to my heart, I must not regard. But God knows the war there was between the sweetness of it and my fortitude.

"Jeff," she said more quietly by-and-by, using that name for the first time. "I—I couldn't have borne it if it hadn't been for you. It was too—too——"

"Never mind, dear," I soothed her. "Let's walk a little more quickly—your aunt will be wondering what's become of you——"

She laughed tremulously. "Kitty will be wondering what's become of you," she said. Then she added timidly, "She's a lucky girl!"

"Oh? Why?" I asked.

"You're so—so——"

But she did not say what.

We turned down Putney Hill.

I said I should say little of this, and I shall say no more. I took her home, but did not go in with her, neither, though I ought to have done so, did I seek Kitty. I went home, but all that I knew of my getting there was that I found myself sitting, with my hat and coat still on, on the edge of the bed in my red-and-green-lighted apartment.

They were turning out from the public-house below when at last I rose sluggishly and began to prepare for bed.

For half the following week I was outside and beyond myself.

But exactly a week, less a day, from that Saturday on which I had held Evie in my arms there dropped a thunderbolt into my life. On that Friday evening I had gone as usual to the cashier for my wages, and he had paid me; but as I had turned away again with my eighteen shillings he had said, as if giving utterance to an afterthought, "Oh—Jeffries—we find we shall not require your services after this week. You can have your notice in writing if you would prefer it."

And he had turned to pay Sutt, the next man in the queue.