A little breeze, blowing cool across London, ruffled her hair. Patting a scarcely displaced curl, she thought: "He kissed these fingers of mine. Another time he will kiss me on the lips. My lips shall answer his kisses."
And all those three days and nights, thought went no further. For the moment it sufficed to know one's self adored and adoring, to dream the impossible, to vision oneself untrammeled as Mollie, a virgin in bridal white standing meek-eyed before one's chosen.
2
But Hyde Park, of a crowded Sunday morning, is no place for dreams: rather is it an epitome of actual London. Here, all along with brown men, yellow men, black men, swathed Arabs, Poles, Czecho-Slovakians, Turks, Spaniards, 5 per cent. Americans, and even (such is the bland insouciance of London) a Bolshevik or so, foregather representatives of all the thousand castes between peer and proletarian which people Democropolis.
Not that these castes commingle! Each, as though disciplined, has its assembly-place. Aliette and Mollie, for instance, taking the diagonal path from Victoria Gate, would no more have let themselves intrude upon the communistic sanctum near Marble Arch, than the fulminating prophets of social equality and unlimited class-warfare would have dared invade the stretch of turf and gravel by the Achilles statue which custom reserves for "church-parade."
"We really ought to have gone to church first," said Mollie.
"Ought we?" answered an absent-minded sister.
Aliette's thoughts were very far from church. That morning, alone in the bow-windowed library among the heavy pictures and the heavier books, she had tried to be her old self again, to reason out the whole issue involved by Ronnie's declaration. But her reasoning had been all confused, baffled, and confounded of the emotions.
One fact only, as she now saw, had emerged star-clear from her hour of introspection: the fact that she loved Ronnie. And she had no right to love Ronnie! She was a married woman. Socially, and in the eyes of the law, she belonged to Hector.
Walking, she tried to delude herself. Perhaps the love was all on her side; perhaps her dreams would endure, bringing no reality.