"You see, Jeff," she murmured, out of a beautiful sense of rest and surrender, "I do so want ours to be a friendship as well as a marriage!" Already the nearness and warmth of her had set me trembling. I don't know that I wanted more "friendship" than needs be; I wanted something, oh, far deeper and rarer. I wanted that full treasury of her warm blood and odorous hair and large and mobile eyes. Friendship? I laughed softly, and gathered these beauties closer.... Understand, I don't for a moment mean that she was unaware of these possessions of hers; I call that oval mirror that later we set up in our bedroom to witness that; but she merely wanted something else, being human, and wanted it the more, being feminine. And as she told me now what she wanted our marriage to be, she put me away a little, with her hands on my breast. "Don't you, too, darling?" she appealed, with a look that put "friendship" quite out of existence.... "Don't I what, rogue?" "Want it to be like that." "No," I bantered, adoring her.... "Oh! Then there's something you won't tell _me_!... Very well," she pouted, "keep your old secrets, but I shall tell you everything for all that, just to shame you...." With a laugh I was drawing her towards me again, when I was arrested by a circumstance so oddly trivial that I really hesitate to set it down. The first I knew of it was that with an involuntary and nervous start I had checked the movement, and had put her slowly away again, looking into her face as a moment before she had looked into mine. To explain what I saw there I must mention that, a few minutes before, the sailor and his girl had risen from the next table and lurched away, their heads together making an apex that wobbled over its base of purple skirt and wide trousers; but I had been only dimly conscious of the noise with which a fresh party had pounced upon their empty places. Now suddenly our alcove was filled with a raw crimson shine. Evie's face, as I held it away, was as if a stage fire glared upon it. And scarcely had the bloodshot light died away when it came again, another violent flood.... I had looked round in less time than it has taken me to explain this. It was only one of the newcomers playing with a penny box of Bengal matches. He struck another. This was a green one, and as he waved the spluttering thing about the shadows of leaves ran to and fro in our little interior. Then as the match went out, all became an ashy darkness again.