“Well,” said Billy, placidly, “I’m in that. If she knows that, she knows all the best twentieth century poets. You seem to be rather acrimonious about her. Hadn’t she read your ‘Latter Day Leavings,’ or what?” “I’m sure I trust not. She’d hate them.... It’s all very well, and I’ve no doubt she’s a very nice little girl--but what does Eddy want with marrying her? Or, indeed, anyone else? He’s not old enough to settle down. And marrying that spaniel-child will mean settling down in a sense.” “Oh, I don’t know. She’s got plenty of fun, and can play all right.” Arnold shook his head over her. “All the same, she’s on the side of darkness and the conventions. She mayn’t know it yet, being still half a child, and in the playing puppy stage, but give her ten years and you’ll see. She’ll become proper. Even now, she’s not sure we’re quite nice or very good. I spotted that.... Don’t you remember, Jane, what I said to you at Welchester about it? With my never-failing perspicacity, I foresaw the turn events would take, and I foresaw also exactly how she would affect Eddy. You will no doubt recollect what I said (I hope you always do); therefore I won’t repeat it now, even for Billy’s sake. But I may tell you, Billy, that I prophesied the worst. I still prophesy it.” “You’re too frightfully particular to live, Arnold,” Billy told him. “She’s a very good sort and a very pleasant person. Rather like a brook in sunlight, I thought her; her eyes are that colour, and her hair and dress are the shadowed parts, and her laugh is like the water chuckling over a stone. I like her.” “Oh, heavens,” Arnold groaned. “Of course you do. You and Jane are hopeless. You may _like_ brooks in sunlight or puppies or anything else in the universe--but you don’t want to go and _marry_ them because of that.” “I don’t,” Billy admitted, peacefully. “But many people do. Eddy obviously is one of them. And I should say it’s quite a good thing for him to do.” “Of course it is,” said Jane, who was more interested at the moment in the effect of the evening mist on the river. “Perhaps they’ll think better of it and break it off before the wedding-day,” Arnold gloomily suggested. “There’s always that hope.... I see no place for this thing called love in a reasonable life. It will smash up Eddy, as it’s smashed up Eileen. I hate the thing.” “Eileen’s a little better lately,” said Jane presently. “She’s going to play at Lovinski’s concert next week.” “She’s rather worse really,” said Billy, a singularly clear-sighted person; and they left it at that. Billy was very likely right. At that moment Eileen was lying on the floor of her room, her head on her flung-out arms, tearless and still, muttering a name over and over, through clenched teeth. The passage of time took her further from him, slow hour by slow hour; took her out into cold, lonely seas of pain, to drown uncomforted. She was not rather better.