And after that, for many a day, their rose-bubble of enchantment--the
frail yet impermeable magic of the grand passion--reblew itself about
those twain, isolating them from their fellows, making even Powolney
Mansions a paradise.
For many a day neither spiritual nor material troubles clouded the
bright mirror of their joint happiness. Scarcely conscious of the
discomforts in which they lived; utterly unconscious of the nascent
hostility--a hostility based on some rumor which had arisen none knew
whence and was tending none knew whither--among their fellow-boarders;
careless alike of financial difficulties, of outlawry, and of ostracism,
they went their way among their uncaring kind.
The high courts were closed; and so far, despite the promises of John
Cartwright, neither county nor police courts afforded Ronnie a single
brief. Wherefore he and Aliette made holiday together, with London for
their playground. Wandering, Ponto at heel, her streets and her parks,
her squares and her terraces, they knew the keen radium of London's
morning, her smoke-gray half-lights, the red-gold radiance of her dimmed
sunsets, the first out-twinkle of her street-lamps, faintly green
against a faintly violet sky, her high evening arcs, and the long lit
saffron parallels of her mysterious nights.
And one day, wandering casually beside London's river, wandering, to be
exact, through Fulham and over Putney Bridge, they knew that, by
sheerest accident, they had found them a home.
To a Lady Hermione or a Lady Cynthia, Embankment House, a great red
building-block which overlooks the Thames, would have been the last word
in discomfort. Except for the automatic lift (into which Ronnie,
Aliette, Ponto, and the uniformed porter who showed them over, squeezed
only as asparagus into a tin), and the gas-cooker left in the tiny
top-floor kitchen by an absconding tenant, no luxuries whatsoever
ameliorated the bareness of Flat 27, Block B. It was, in fact, hardly
more than the model working-man's tenement of its original builder's
dream. But since it possessed five tolerable rooms, the possibility of
installing a geyser bath, and, above all things, its own front door,
they decided instantaneously on its acquirement, seeking out the
secretary of the house and paying the requisite deposit of a quarter's
rent that very afternoon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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