The "ridiculous flat" held one supreme joy--the finest view which a Londoner may have of London. From its parlor window, of a day, one could survey all the city--from Putney Church to St. Paul's, from Chiswick Mall where once red-heeled gallants tripped it with the ladies of St. James's, to Keats's Hampstead and the dim blue of Highgate. At that window, on an April evening, Aliette and her lover stood to contemplate the pageant which Thames and town proffered nightly for their delight. Dusk had fallen, masking the river-pageant with a cloak of indigo and silver. Northward, a saffron shimmer under murky skies, lay London. Westward, the river dwindled out between its fringing lamps to darkness and the misty fields. "Time for bed," said Ronnie practically. He made to close the curtains, but Aliette restrained him. "Not yet, man." "Why? Aren't you sleepy?" Aliette made no answer. She seemed to have forgotten his presence. Her eyes were all for the pageant below; her ears all for the faint hum of the city which mounted, drowsily murmurous, to their high apartment. And after a little while, knowing the need for solitude upon her, Ronnie tiptoed away. Aliette was hardly conscious of his going. It seemed to her as though--in that moment--she were aloof from him, from all men; as though her soul, wandering free, mingled with myriads of other souls whom night had liberated from their earthly bodies to hover above the city. The little French clock on the mantelpiece ticked and ticked. Hardly she heard it ticking. The earthly minutes passed and passed, flowing under her, flowing away into the ocean of time as the river-flood flows away into the oceans of the sea. From below came sound of London's clocks chiming the quarters. Thought died in her brain. Only the imaginative power was alive. Imagination's self died. Only her soul was alive. And, with her soul, she dreamed a dream. She dreamed that her letter to Hector had been written, that Hector had answered it. She saw herself setting out to meet him. He had sent his car to fetch her from Embankment House. She saw herself stepping into the car. It was their old car; but the man whose back she could see through the plate-glass of the cabriolet was not their old chauffeur. "I wonder what his name is," she thought. The car set out, noiseless. It left Embankment House behind; it crossed Putney Bridge. It came, between miles and miles of utterly empty streets, into London. A peculiar grayness, neither of the night nor of the day, a peculiar silence, almost a silence of death, brooded over London. No lights gleamed from its ghostly houses; no feet, no wheels echoed on its ghostly paving. The car spun on, noiseless--beyond the ghostly gray into ghostly green--and now it seemed to Aliette as though the time were twilight-time; as though she were in Hyde Park; as though in a few minutes she would make the remembered door in Lancaster Gate.