She obeyed him, and with a tremendous exultation he swung her round, as if indeed he were carrying her to the edge of the world. The mask no longer veiled her face; her eyelids drooped, clouding her eyes; her lips were parted: she was now dead white. Michael crooked her left arm until he could touch her shoulder.
“Look at me. Look at me. The dance will soon be over.”
She opened her eyes, and into their depths of dusky blue he danced and danced until, waking with the end of the music, he found himself and Lily close to Sylvia Scarlett, who was laughing at them where she stood in the corner of the room under a canopy of holly.
Lily was for the rest of the evening herself as Michael had always known her. She had always been superficially indifferent to anything that was happening round her, and she behaved at this carnival as if it were a street full of dull people among whom by chance she was walking. Nor with her companions was she much more alert, though when she danced with Michael her indifference became a passionate languor. Soon after midnight both the girls declared they were tired of the Redcliffe Hall, and they asked Michael to escort them home. He was going to fetch a cab, but they stopped him, saying that Tinderbox Lane, where they lived, was only a little way along on the other side of the Fulham Road. The fog was very dense when they came out, and Michael took the girls’ arms with a delicious sense of intimacy, with a feeling, too, of extraordinary freedom from the world, as if they were all three embarked upon an adventure in this eclipse of fog. He had packed their shoes deep down in the pockets of his overcoat, and with the possession of their shoes he had a sensation of possessing the wearers of them. The fog was denser and denser: they paused upon the edge of the curb, listening for oncoming traffic. A distant omnibus was lumbering far down the Fulham Road. Michael caught their arms close, and the three of them seemed to sail across to the opposite pavement. He had nothing to say because he was so happy, and Lily had nothing to say because she talked now no more than she used to talk. So it was Sylvia who had to carry on the conversation, and since most of this consisted of questions to Lily and Michael about their former friendship, which neither Lily nor Michael answered, even Sylvia was discouraged at last; and they walked on silently through the fog, Michael clasping the girls close to him and watching all the time Lily’s hand holding up her big black cloak.
“Here we are, you two dreamers,” said Sylvia, pulling them to a stop by a narrow turning which led straight from the pavement unexpectedly, without any dip down into a road.
“Through here? How fascinating!” said Michael.
They passed between two posts, and in another three minutes stopped in front of a door set in a wall.
“I’ve got the key,” said Sylvia, and she unlocked the door.
“But this is extraordinary,” Michael exclaimed. “Aren’t we walking through a garden?”
“Yes, it’s quite a long garden,” Sylvia informed him. There was a smell of damp earth here that sweetened the harshness of the fog, and Michael thought that he had never imagined anything so romantic as following Lily in single file along the narrow gravel path of a mysterious garden like this. There must have been thirty yards of path, before they walked up the steps of what seemed to be a sort of balcony.