The phrase worried him for a while. He had a dim, uneasy feeling that he had used it, as Viola’s and the young man’s remark about Ealing, in the forgotten telegrams. Well, well. He shrugged his shoulders. What did it matter? In a day or two he must inevitably learn their purport. Sufficient for the night was the beauty thereof. A damned queer thing, beauty. He mused. He had known it, of course, as an intellectual conception. But now, it was an emotional matter. It plucked at things within his inmost being and swept unimagined chords. The Cathedral. This dreamy fruitful plain, panting for the soon-coming swell of moonlight. Yes, he must go back. But things would never be quite the same. The friendly neighbours in the red-and-yellow-striped caravan busied themselves with preparations for departure. They must take up early position in the fair-ground, according to police regulations. They advised Monsieur to do the same. Monsieur, smoking contentedly, replied that he had plenty of time before him, and watched them start. They made polite farewells. The last to do so was the obvious sister of the shock-headed boy, a half-gipsy wench in the early twenties, artlessly clad in soiled and scanty raiment, but superb in the flowing contours of her lithe youth, and in her coarse loveliness. ‘_A demain, Monsieur._’ ‘_A demain et bonsoir, Mademoiselle_,’ said he with a smile and a bow. She lingered a few instants holding him with eyes half-mocking, half-alluring. Then, with an ironical toss of her head, she turned and faded into the dusk. Only when she had gone, did he realize that, during his meal, his gaze had rested pleasurably and conjecturingly upon her; and now her startling picture was imprinted on his mind. She was but a slatternly wild thing, unwashed, unkempt; the only external note of the picturesque about her being a flaming orange neckerchief; living on the fringe of civilization, with possibly no morals to speak of. But, God! She was alive! For the first time in his cramped existence, he grew vehemently aware of the wonder of woman as magnificent woman, of her wonder as elemental complement of man. It had been only the flash of a dark-eyed drab across his vision. But the flash awakened him, so that he gasped, to the mighty potentialities of life. God! That girl was alive in all her sensuous and animal mystery. And he--he smote his brow--he, too, was alive. Lustily alive.... The thought stole into his brain: Martha--Martha who had twitted him with being a dead man--had she ever been anything else but a dead woman? What of the physical mystery of the flesh, which this girl of naught had suddenly proclaimed, had he ever dreamed of conjecturing from the cold and acid woman whose lips conventionally kissed had been as unresponsive as the hem of her garment? Nothing. As woman, newly revealed, Martha was dead. And she loved her living death, gloried in it, strove to maintain all who came near her within the sphere of its blight.