“You don’t think you’ll fall in love with anybody else?”
“I don’t suppose so.”
“Only suppose?” Michael would echo on a fierce pause.
“Well, no, I won’t.”
“You promise?”
“Yes, yes, I promise,” Lily would pout.
Then the rhythm of their walk would be renewed, and arm-in-arm they would travel on, until the next foolish perplexity demanded solution. Twilight would often find them still on the road, and when some lofty avenue engulphed their path, the uneasy warmth of the overarching trees would draw them very close, while hushed endearments took them slowly into lampshine.
When the dripping January rains came down, Michael spent many afternoons in the morning-room of Lily’s house. Here, subject only to Doris’s exaggerated hesitation to enter, Michael would build up for himself and Lily the indissoluble ties of a childhood that, though actually it was spent in ignorance of each other’s existence, possessed many links of sentimental communion.
For instance, on the wall hung Cherry Ripe—the same girl in white frock and pink sash who nearly fourteen years ago had conjured for Michael the first hazy intimations of romance. Here she hung, staring down at them as demurely if not quite so sheerly beautiful as of old. Lily observed that the picture was not unlike Doris at the same age, and Michael felt at once that such a resemblance gave it a permanent value. Certainly his etchings of Montmartre and views of the Sussex Downs would never be hallowed by the associations that made sacred this oleograph of a Christmas Annual.
There were the picture-books of Randolph Caldecott tattered identically with his own, and Michael pointed out to Lily that often they must have sat by the fire reading the same verse at the same moment. Was not this thought almost as fine as the actual knowledge of each other’s daily life would have been? There were other books whose pages, scrawled and dog-eared, were softened by innumerable porings to the texture of Japanese fairy-books. In a condition practically indistinguishable all of these could be found both in Carlington Road and Trelawny Road.