"You wish it?" Adrian exclaimed, swift to detect every shade of meaning in her voice. "Because, if not, there is no reason why you should. If you hadn't said just now you wanted to go----" She drew one hand away and turned a little aside. "I know," she said, "I did say it. Really and truly I don't want to go; it makes me uncomfortable to think about him, but I want to have been." "Get it over then. Ask, and come away as quickly as you can." "To-morrow?" said Barbara. "I thought, perhaps, as aunt was not going with us about those photograph frames, that to-morrow might do. I couldn't go with aunt." "You have thought of everything. Go on." "You might put me into a cab after we leave the shop," she continued. "I think that would be best. I would go and just inquire, and then come straight on here. I don't want to explain to anybody, and if you say it is all right----" "Why, it is all right, of course. That's settled then," said Adrian. * * * * * The next day was dreary even for late November. Adrian and Barbara passed through the frame-maker's door into an outer gloom, chilly and acrid with a touch of fog, and variegated with slowly-descending blacks. Everything was dirty and damp. There were gas-lights in the shop windows of a dim tawny yellow. Scarlett looked right and left at the sodden street and then upward in the direction of the sky. "This isn't very nice," he said; "hadn't we better go straight home?" "No--please!" Barbara entreated. "We have filled up to-morrow and the next day, and aunt has asked some people to afternoon tea on Saturday." "All right; it may be better when we get to Westbourne Park. I'll go a bit of the way with you." He looked for a cab. Barbara waited passively by his side, gazing straight before her. She had never looked prettier than she did at that moment, standing on the muddy step in the midst of the universal dinginess. Excitement had given tension and brilliancy to her face, she was flushed and warm in her wrappings of dark fur, and above the rose-red of her cheeks her eyes were shining like stars. "Here we are!" said Scarlett, as he hailed a loitering hansom. They drove northward, passing rows of shops, all blurred and glistening in the foggy air, and wide, muddy crossings, where people started back at the driver's hoarse shout. Scarlett, with Barbara's hand in his, watched the long procession of figures on the pavement--dusky figures which looked like marionnettes, going mechanically and ceaselessly on their way. To the young man, driving by at his ease, their measured movements had an air of ineffectual toil; they were on the treadmill, they hurried for ever, and were always left behind. Looking at them he thought of the myriads in the rear, stepping onward, stepping continually. If they had really been marionnettes! But the droll thing was that each figure had a history; there was a world-picture in every one of those little, jogging heads.