“No!” he shouted derisively.
“Give me the machine, won’t you?” she said, holding out her woolly hand. “I believe I’m safer.”
“Do you want it?” he shouted.
“Yes, I’m sure I’m safer.”
He handed her the little brown dispatch case, which was really a Marconi listening machine for her deafness. She marched erect as ever. He shoved his hands deep in his overcoat pockets and slouched along beside her, as if he wouldn’t make his legs firm. The road curved down in front of them, clean and pale with snow under the lamps. A motor car came churning up. A few dark figures slipped away into the dark recesses of the houses, like fishes among rocks above a sea bed of white sand. On the left was a tuft of trees sloping upward into the dark.
He kept looking around, pushing out his finely shaped chin and his hooked nose as if he were listening for something. He could still hear the motor car climbing on to the Heath. Below was the yellow, foul-smelling glare of the Hampstead tube station. On the right the trees.
The girl, with her alert, pink-and-white face, looked at him sharply, inquisitively. She had an odd, nymphlike inquisitiveness, sometimes like a bird, sometimes a squirrel, sometimes a rabbit; never quite like a woman. At last he stood still, as if he would go no farther. There was a curious, baffled grin on his smooth, cream-colored face.
“James,” he said loudly to her, leaning toward her ear. “Do you hear somebody laughing?”
“Laughing?” she retorted quickly. “Who’s laughing?”
“I don’t know. Somebody!” he shouted, showing his teeth at her in a very odd way.