"Oh, look at him, Ranny! Isn't he a little lamb?" Winny's eyes were tender, and her face quivered with a little dreamy smile. "D'you want to take him home and play with him? Shall I ask if he's for sale?" "Oh, Ranny!" She turned away. And he drew her arm in his. "You won't be happy till you've got him, Winky." She said nothing to that; only her mouth, without her knowing it, kept for him its little dreamy smile. "I believe," said Ranny, "you've never reelly got over Stanley's goin' into knickers." "I _love_ his knickers," she protested. "Yes, but you'd love _him_ better if he was that size, wouldn't you?" "I couldn't love him better than I do, Ranny. You know I couldn't. And I wouldn't like him to be any different to what he is." She was very serious, very earnest, almost as if she thought he'd really meant it. Silent in the grip of an emotion too thick and close for utterance, they wandered back again to the enchanted garden where the band had played for them. The garden was silent, too. The bandstand was empty, black, unearthly as if haunted by some thin ghost of passionate sound; and empty, row after row of seats in the great parterre, except for a few couples who sat leaning to each other, hand in hand, finding a happy solitude in that twilight desolation. Like worshipers strayed into some church, they joined this enraptured, oblivious company of devotees, choosing seats as far as possible from any other pair. * * * * * "Hadn't we better be going?" They had sat there in silence, holding each other's hands. The excitement, the delirious devil in them, had spent itself, and under it they felt the heaving, dragging groundswell of their passion. To Winny it had never come before like this. Up till now it had been enough simply to be with Ranny. Merely to look at him gave her profound and poignant pleasure. To touch him in those rare accidental contacts the adventure brought them, to feel the firm muscles of his arm under his coat sleeve, stopped her breath with a kind of awe and wonder, as if in Ranny's body thus discerned she came unaware upon some transcendent mystery. Yet Winny knew now why, in what way, and with what terrible strength she loved him and he her. She loved him, primarily and supremely, for himself, for the simple fact that he was Ranny. She loved him also for his body, for his slenderness, and for his strong-clipping limbs, and she loved him for his face because it could not by any possibility be anybody else's.