“One doesn’t, you know. This scrap was bitterly afraid. I knew! But do you think it would tell me? Not it. We discussed _Rumpelstiltskin_; but there was a bear behind our chair all the while and our reflections in the looking-glass, and always the dark. Got some matches?” She lit the night-light and set it afloat in its saucer. The tiny flame turned the black room grey—a ghostly, friendless grey. Justin glanced thoughtfully from Timothy to the swaying shadows and back again to Timothy, a small enough sojourner in the desert of double bed. He coughed. “I say, Laura——” “Yes?” “I say, Laura—let’s give him two night-lights and damn the expense!” “All right!” Her voice was casual, yet there was something flame-like about her as she followed him across the room, sheltering the lighted match with closed hands, translucently scarlet, a living lamp that lit up her delicate face and laughing, passionate eyes and the duller red of her hair. And with the same flame-like restlessness she hovered about him, enjoying, a little feverishly, her brief authority. “No, Justin—not there. Put it in the dark corner, by the hanging cupboard. Yes—oh, quite safe. And, Justin—if you fastened the curtain back—right back—here, take my scarf—he would see at once there was nothing behind it. That’s splendid. I don’t think he’ll wake though, do you? Let’s come away quietly.” They tiptoed out of the room. But before the lights of the landing Laura shrank oddly, like a bright sword slipping back into its sheath. Justin glanced at her more than once as they went down, and, the stairway being narrow, he made more room for them both by slipping his arm through hers. He was discovering that he did not like Laura to look tired. Now their curiously impersonal alliance had never needed more than a handshake at rare intervals to confirm it. Such an unfamiliar gesture, unconscious as he was that it had been a caress, meant, she knew, so much from him, implied so much of intimacy and approval, that she flushed at his touch in a pang of secret delight. Yet the fear that was always upon her when she loved him most, not of him, but of untimely divergence from his standards, of unwittingly jarring his fastidious and uncertain taste, held her, now as always, passive, denying him nothing yet not daring to respond, lest an intonation, a glance, or even the little welcoming pressure on his arm, should qualify the security of their relationship. Yet, in spite of her quiescence and his unconsciousness, they contrived to drift past the drawing-room door, and the billiard-room door, and all the allurements of the bridge table, to agree silently to a pacing up and down of the dim terrace, with its black shadows and window-pools of light, and its hedge of larkspur and lilies, and Canterbury bells that jingled hoarsely, as Laura’s skirts passing and repassing set them a-sway.