The Square gate brought them to a stop. It was locked, but she had the key. The lock was stiff, but turned easily for John Sherman. ‘How strong you are,’ she said. It was an iridescent evening of spring. The leaves of the bushes had still their faint green. As Margaret darted about at the tennis, a red feather in her cap seemed to rejoice with its wearer. Everything was at once gay and tranquil. The whole world had that unreal air it assumes at beautiful moments, as though it might vanish at a touch like an iridescent soap-bubble. After a little Margaret said she was tired, and, sitting on a garden-seat among the bushes, began telling him the plots of novels lately read by her. Suddenly she cried: ‘The novel-writers were all serious people like you. They are so hard on people like me. They always make us come to a bad end. They _say_ we are always acting, acting, acting; and what else do you serious people do? You act before the world. I think, do you know, _we_ act before ourselves. All the old foolish kings and queens in history were like us. They laughed and beckoned and went to the block for no very good purpose. I daresay the headsmen were like you.’ ‘We would never cut off so pretty a head.’ ‘Oh, yes, you would--you would cut off mine to-morrow.’ All this she said vehemently, piercing him with her bright eyes. ‘You would cut off my head to-morrow,’ she repeated, almost fiercely; ‘I tell you you would.’ Her departure was always unexpected, her moods changed with so much rapidity. ‘Look!’ she said, pointing where the clock on St. Peter’s church showed above the bushes. ‘Five minutes to five. In five minutes my mother’s tea-hour. It is like growing old. I go to gossip. Good-bye.’ The red feather shone for a moment among the bushes and was gone. IV The next day and the day after, Sherman was followed by those bright eyes. When he opened a letter at his desk they seemed to gaze at him from the open paper, and to watch him from the flies upon the ceiling. He was even a worse clerk than usual. One evening he said to his mother, ‘Miss Leland has beautiful eyes.’ ‘My dear, she puts belladonna in them.’ ‘What a thing to say!’ ‘I know she does, though her mother denies it.’ ‘Well, she is certainly beautiful,’ he answered. ‘My dear, if she has an attraction for you, I don’t want to discourage it. She is rich as girls go nowadays; and one woman has one fault, another another: one’s untidy, one fights with her servants, one fights with her friends, another has a crabbed tongue when she talks of them.’ Sherman became again silent, finding no fragment of romance in such a discourse.