"Then pity me. Pity me from the fields when you walk in them, as you and I have so often walked, over fallen leaves--pity me from your fire when you sit by it and see in the embers things too beautiful to be--from your meals when you eat them--you and I have had only one meal together, Janey--and from your bed when you lie waking in it. Janey, Janey--pity me." "Pity ... yes...." He was holding her in his arms, looking into her beautiful, haggard face. A sudden pang contracted her limbs, then released them into an abandonment of weakness. "Quentin ... promise me that you will never forget how much you loved me." "Janey!" "Promise me." "Janey, how dare you!--'loved you'! What do you mean?" "Oh, please promise!" She was crying. He had never seen her like this. Hitherto at their meetings she had left the stress and earthquake of love to him, fronting it with a sweet, half-timid calm. Now she clung to him, twisted and trembled. "Promise, Quentin." "Well, since you're such a silly little thing, I will. Listen. 'I promise never to forget how much I loved you.' There, you darling fool." "Thank you ..." she said weakly. He drew her close, kissed her, and laughed at her. "Janey--you're the spring, with its doubts and distresses. You were the autumn when autumn was here, all tanned and flushed and rumpled, with September in your eyes. Now you're the spring, thin, soft, aloof and wondering--you're sunshine behind a cloud--you're the promise of August and heavy apple-boughs." "And you'll never forget how much you loved me...." II The golden lights of late afternoon were kindled in London, warring with the smoky remnants of an April day. They shone on the wet pavements and mud-slopped streets--down Oxford Street poured the full blaze of the sunset, flamy, fogged, mysterious, crinkling into dull purples behind the Circus and the spire in Langham Place. The Queen's Hall was emptying--crowds poured out, taxi-horns answered taxi-whistles, and the surge of the streets swept by, gathering up the units, and whirling them into the nothingness of many people. It gathered up Nigel Furlonger, and rushed him, like a bubble on a torrent, down Regent Street, with his face to the darkness of the south--lit from below by the first flash of the electric advertisements in Piccadilly Circus, from above by the first pale, useless glimmer of a star. He walked quickly, his chin lifted, but mechanically taking his part in the general hustle, not too much in dreamland to make way, shift, pause, or plunge, as the ballet of the pavements might require. His hands were clenched in his pockets. He, perhaps alone among those hundreds, saw the timid star.