sickening fear that came when their hands and faces touched.

"Do you know," he said, "what it will be like--afterwards?"

She began, slowly, to count the buttons of his waistcoat.

"Have you ever tried to think what it will be like?"

"Yes."

Last night, lying awake in the dark, she had tried to think. She had
thought of shoulders heaving over her, of arms holding her, of a face
looking into hers, a honey-white, beardless face, blue eyes, black
eyebrows drawn close down on to the blue. Jimmy's face, not Maurice
Jourdain's.

That was in September. October passed. She began to wonder when he would
come again.

He came on the last day of November.


X.

"Maurice, you're keeping something from me. Something's happened.
Something's made you unhappy."

"Yes. Something's made me unhappy."

The Garthdale road. Before them, on the rise, the white highway showed