"We must keep our liberty and our work, Fanshaw, whatever we do." Fanshaw was startled by the tenseness in her voice. There was a hollow look about her cheeks he had never noticed before. "Do you know," Nan was saying, "I'm rather frightened about my music tonight. I mean the divine fire, the power to let oneself go, to rule imperiously an instrument and an audience ... But I'm dreadfully determined. You won't go back on me, will you?" "What a funny question." "But why are we talking in this stilted way, already under the shadow of the holy institution ... We've known each other long enough to get married without a quiver, I should say." "Perhaps it is that we've put on so many brakes in our time, that it's a little difficult to take them off now we want to," drawled Fanshaw with a wan smile. Nan laughed excitedly. Fanshaw had put an arm around her shoulder. He felt her body stiffening against his. "Fanshaw," she said in a changed voice, "do you see that star?" "L'étoile du berger." Above the dark roof of the apartment house across the park a star hovered green and trembling like jelly. They watched it in silence. Nan turned her face up quickly towards Fanshaw's in sudden passionate hunger. He folded her in his arms and kissed her lips lightly. With her head against his chest and her body rigid in his arms he stared out across her tumbled hair as the star sank flickering out of sight. He was trembling. He was full of swift shudders of foreboding. He bent his head to kiss her hair. She tore herself away from him and threw herself sobbing into the armchair. "Fanshaw, I can't ... I can't do it. It's all false," she was crying in a thin choked voice. Fanshaw was standing stiffly in front of her. He felt desperately cold and tired. "Nan, this is horrible ... Pull yourself together." She turned to him a twisted face wet with tears. "No, go away for the present ... Leave me alone." She slipped to the floor and lay with her head on the blue velvet seat of the chair, her sandy hair undone, her body shaken with sobs. In a curious maze of pain Fanshaw walked down the apartment house steps. Through spring-reeking streets, full of laughs and flower-scents and flushed cheeks and kidding voices of boys and girls arm in arm, he walked with long, sedate steps home. VIII