And even if her days had been dull, the evenings would have made their dullness worth while. Those evenings! Their one servant abed. She and her man alone together, isolated high above London--solitary--safe--not even the telephone to connect them with their kind: Ronnie, pipe between his lips, his face tired yet happy in the glow of the fire, his long limbs outstretched, his lips moving rarely to speech; Aliette, some unread novel on her lap, the light of the reading-lamp a-shimmer on her dimpled shoulders, on the vivid of her hair and the vivid of her eyes; Aliette, pleasantly wearied of body, pleasantly vacuous of thought, speaking rarely as her mate, utterly happy in his silent company, so happy that all the terrors of her past life with Hector seemed like a nightmare dreamed long since in girlhood and remembered in maturity only as foolishness. Nevertheless, as London March blew chilly toward London April, Aliette again grew fearful. Try as she would to elude them, moments came when she craved so desperately for maternity that Ronnie's very passion seemed a reproach. And in those moments her imagination fashioned itself children--a boy-child and a girl-child--Dennis and Etta--dream-babies who would bind her man to her forever and forever. Ronnie, too, had his moments of fear, of hope, of dreamery. But for the most part they were a silent couple; and only once did either give voice to their secret thoughts. Then it was Ronnie, who said with one of his whimsical smiles: "You've no idea, Alie, what an orator I'm getting to be. If only I could get one really big case. A murder trial, for instance. But one needs luck for that!" So the equable days went by. 4 April came; and, to Aliette, the fret of spring. More and more with every opening bud, with every deepening of the green leaf-haze along the river-bank below her windows, she yearned for children--for Ronnie's children. Her body gave no sign; but already, as though for warning, her mind was pregnant with a new power, the power of prophetic imagination which comes only to the isolated. Sometimes--as when, after one of Mollie's rare visits, it showed her sister married to Wilberforce--this new power pleased Aliette; sometimes, playing about Hector, it frightened her. But always it made her restless; so that, abandoning more and more of her household duties to Caroline Staley, she walked again with Ponto, as she had walked in the old days when Ronnie was not yet hers.