"Oh, a fine place," she answered pettishly, "if you could get away from
it." He felt faintly hostile to her adventurousness. Why should a woman
want to go wandering about the world?

From a dream of foreign countries she asked suddenly, "How long were you
a sailor?"

"Three years. From the time I was seventeen till I was twenty."

Then it struck him: "How did you know I'd been a sailor?"

"I just knew," she said, with something of a sibylline air. Evidently he
was thinking how clever it was of her to have guessed it, and indeed she
thought it was a remarkable example of her instinctive understanding of
men. And Yaverland, on his side, was letting his mind travel down a
channel of feeling which he knew to be silly and sentimental, like a man
who drinks yet another glass of wine though he knows it will make his
head swim, and was wondering if this clairvoyance meant that there was a
mystic tie between them. But it soon flashed over Ellen's mind that the
reason why she thought that he had been a sailor was that he had looked
like one when he came into the hall in his raindashed oilskins. She
wondered if she ought to tell him so. An unhappy silence fell upon her,
which he did not notice because he was thinking how strange it was that
even in this black lane, between blank walls through which they were
passing, when he could not see her, when she was not saying anything,
when he could get no personal intimation of her at all except that
softness of tread, it was pleasant to be with her. But he began to feel
anxiety because of the squalor of the district. This must be a mews, for
there were sodden shreds of straw on the cobblestones, and surely that
was the thud of sleeping horses' hooves that sounded like the blows of