"Nor I," he answered, inexorably.
"Are you quite sure it's impossible? The mock marriage, I mean? In books it's always so frightfully easy, even when the girl isn't helping?"
"I'm afraid it's impossible," said he. "I wish it wasn't. Look at that blue chap," he added, indicating a fat pigeon for the benefit of a passing boy. "You must go back to your aunts. And I must go back to . . . oh, well, there's nothing much for me to go back to."
They were walking along King Street now. "It does seem rather as though a sponge were going to pass over the slate . . . and there wouldn't be much left," she said.
He glanced at her, suddenly alert. If she felt that . . . why, then. . . .
He wished that the scene had not been in one of the most frequented streets of the City of London. If it had been in a drawing-room, for instance—her drawing-room—it would have been possible to say the words of parting with something of dignity and finality. But here, with—in the background and not to be evaded—that snorting taxicab over whose closed door their farewells must be made. . . . But need it be across a taxicab door?
"Let us," he said, "take a cab. I will go with you as far as Hyde Park Square."
"Shall we have the hood down?" she asked, with intention. "It doesn't matter now if any one does see us." But he pretended not to hear, and the hood remained as it was.
They were silent all the crowded way along Cheapside, where there were blocks, as usual, and the drivers of lorries and wagons were cheerfully profane. Silent, too, along Newgate Street and New Oxford Street. The driver, being a wise man, turned up Bloomsbury Street to escape from the blocks in Oxford Street; they passed the British Museum and, presently, the Midlothian Hotel. And as they passed it, each thought of the breakfast there only that morning, when she had poured the coffee of one from whom she had then had no mind to part.
"Oh, why are we doing it?" She spoke suddenly, and her speech had the effect of a cry. "We didn't mean to say good-by, and now we're going to. Don't let's."