LITMIR.BIZ

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and the bitter north wind had brought the snow, and it drifted now in feather-soft touches against the windows.

      He thought of the good warm dining-room in Russell Square – of the gathering of aunts and uncles and cousins, uncongenial, perhaps, but still human, and he shivered in his fur-lined coat and his icy solitude, damning himself for the fool he knew he was.

      And even as he damned, his breath was stopped, and his heart leaped at the sound, faint but unmistakable, of a key in the front door. If a man exist not too remote from his hairy ancestors to have lost the habit of the pricking ear, he was that man. He pricked his ears, so far as the modern man may, and listened.

      The key grated in the lock – grated and turned; the door was opened, and banged again. Something was set down in the little passage, set down thumpingly and wholly without precaution. He heard a hand move along the partition of match-boarding. He heard the latch of the kitchen door rise and fall – and he heard the scrape and spurt of a struck match.

      He sat still. He would catch this burglar red-handed.

      Through the ill-fitting partitions of the jerry-built bungalow he could hear the intruder moving recklessly in the kitchen. The legs of chairs and tables grated on the brick floor. He took off his shoes, rose, and crept out through the passage towards the kitchen door. It stood ajar. A clear-cut slice of light came from it. Treading softly in his stockinged feet, he came to it and looked in. One candle, stuck in a tea-saucer, burned on the table. A weak blue-and-yellow glimmer came from some sticks in the bottom of the fireplace.

      Kneeling in front of this, breathless with the endeavour to blow the damp sticks to flame, crouched the burglar. A woman. A girl. She had laid aside hat and cloak. The first sight of her was like a whirlwind sweeping over heart and brain. For the bright brown hair that the candle-light lingered in was like Her dear brown hair – and when she rose suddenly, and turned towards the door, his heart stood still, for it was She – her very self.

      She had not seen him. He retreated, in all the stillness his tortured nerves allowed, and sat down again in the fur coat and the dining-room. She had not heard him. He was, for some moments, absolutely stunned, then he crept to the window. In the poignant stillness of the place he could hear the heavy flakes of snow dabbing softly at the glass.

      She was here. She, like him, had fled to this refuge, confident in its desertion at this season by both the families who shared a right to it. She was there – he was there. Why had she fled? The question did not wait to be answered; it sank before the other question. What was he to do? The whole literary soul of the man cried out against either of the obvious courses of action.

      "I can go in," he said, "and surprise her, and tell her I love her, and then walk out with dignified propriety, and leave her alone here. That's conventional and dramatic. Or I can sneak off without her knowing I've been here at all, and leave her to spend the night unprotected in this infernal frozen dog-hutch. That's conventional enough, heaven knows! But what's the use of being a reasonable human being with free-will if you can't do anything but the literarily and romantically obvious?"

      Here a sudden noise thrilled him. Next moment he drew a long breath of relief. She had but dropped a gridiron. As it crashed and settled down with a rhythmic rattle on the kitchen flags, the thought flowed through him like a river of Paradise. "If she did love me – if I loved her – what an hour and what a moment this would be!"

      Meantime she, her hands helpless with cold, was dropping clattering gridirons not five yards from him.

      Suppose he went out to the kitchen and suddenly announced himself!

      How flat – how obvious!

      Suppose he crept quietly away and went to the inn at New Romney!

      How desperately flat! How more than obvious!

      Suppose he – but the third course refused itself to the desperate clutch of his drowning imagination, and left him clinging to the bare straw of a question. What should he do?

      Suddenly the really knightly and unconventional idea occurred to him, an idea that would save him from the pit of the obvious, yawning on each side.

      There was a bicycle shed, where, also, wood was stored and coal, and lumber of all sorts. He would pass the night there, warm in his fur coat, and his determination not to let his conduct be shaped by what people in books would have done. And in the morning – strong with the great renunciation of all the possibilities that this evening's meeting held – he would come and knock at the front door – just like anybody else – and —qui vivra verra. At least, he would be watching over her rest – and would be able to protect the house from tramps.

      Very gently and cautiously, all in the dark, he pushed his bag behind the sofa, covered the stores box with a liberty cloth from a side table, crept out softly, and softly opened the front door; it opened softly, that is, but it shut with an unmistakable click that stung in his ears as he stood on one foot on the snowy doorstep struggling with the knots of his shoe laces.

      The bicycle shed was uncompromisingly dark, and smelt of coal sacks and paraffin. He found a corner – between the coals and the wood – and sat down on the floor.

      "Bother the fur coat," was his answer to the doubt whether coal dust and broken twigs were a good down-setting for that triumph of the Bond Street art. There he sat, full of a chastened joy at the thought that he watched over her – that he, sleepless, untiring, was on guard, ready, at an instant's warning, to spring to her aid, should she need protection. The thought was mightily soothing. The shed was cold. The fur coat was warm. In five minutes he was sleeping peacefully as any babe.

      When he awoke it was with the light of a big horn lantern in his eyes, and in his ears the snapping of wood.

      She was there – stooping beside the heaped faggots, breaking off twigs to fill the lap of her up-gathered blue gown; the shimmery silk of her petticoat gleamed greenly. He was partly hidden by a derelict bicycle and a watering-can.

      He hardly dared to draw breath.

      Composedly she broke the twigs. Then like a flash she turned towards him.

      "Who's there?" she said.

      An inspiration came to him – and this, at least, was not flat or obvious. He writhed into the darkness behind a paraffin cask, slipped out of his fur coat, and plunged his hands in the dust of the coal.

      "Don't be 'ard on a pore cove, mum," he mumbled, desperately rubbing the coal dust on to his face; "you wouldn't go for to turn a dawg out on a night like this, let alone a pore chap outer work!"

      Even as he spoke he admired the courage of the girl. Alone, miles from any other house, she met a tramp in an outhouse as calmly as though he had been a fly in the butter.

      "You've no business here, you know," she said briskly. "What did you come for?"

      "Shelter, mum – I won't take nothing as don't belong to me – not so much as a lump of coal, mum, not if it was ever so!"

      She turned her head. He almost thought she smiled.

      "But I can't have tramps sleeping here," she said.

      "It's not as if I was a reg'lar tramp," he said, warming to his part as he had often done on the stage in his A.D.C. days. "I'm a respectable working-man, mum, as 'as seen better days."

      "Are you hungry?" she said. "I'll give you something to eat before you go if you'll come to the door in five minutes."

      He could not refuse – but when she was gone into the house he could bolt. So he said —

      "Now may be the blessing! It's starving I am, mum, and on Christmas Eve!"

      This time she did smile: it was beyond a doubt. He had always thought her smile charming. She turned at the door, and her glance followed the lantern's rays as they pierced the darkness where he crouched.

      The moment he heard the house door shut, he sprang up, and lifted the fur coat gingerly to the wood-block. Flight, instant flight! Yet how could he present himself at New Romney with a fur coat and a face like a collier's? He had drawn a bucket of water from the well earlier in the day; some would be left; it was close by the back door. He tiptoed over the snow and washed,

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