"Oh, ma, don't be silly. Get up? Oh, what a liberty!"
"Lying in bed on this lovely morning," protested Mrs. Raeburn.
"That's it. Now you carry on about the lovely morning. Young May's already woke me up once to look at the sun. All I know is it makes the room look most shocking dusty."
The day deepened from a morning of pale gold to an amber afternoon, whose melting splendor suffused the thin blue autumn sky with a glittering haze. Jenny stood pensive awhile upon the doorstep.
"Hark, what a noise the birds are all making. Whatever's the matter?"
"They're pleased it's fine," said May.
"Oh, they're pleased, too, are they?" Jenny exclaimed, as, with a long shadow leading her slim form, she went through a world of russet leaves and cheeping sparrows to meet her lover.
At the club there was a message from Irene to say she was ill and unable to keep the appointment.
"That's funny," Jenny thought. "Seems as if it's bound to be."
Through Leicester Square she went with eyes that twisted a hundred necks in retrospect. Down Charing Cross Road she hurried, past the old men peering into the windows of bookshops, past the delicatessen shops full of gold and silver paper, past a tall, gloomy church haunted by beggars, hurrying faster and faster until she swung into the sunlight of Shaftesbury Avenue. There was Maurice studying very earnestly the photographs outside the Palace Theater.