"Tuck this round you. Now, where shall we go that's within reach? Richmond?"
"Oh no!" hastily—"not Richmond. Let's go to Hampstead."
"No; I don't care for Hampstead," with a sudden shadow of distaste. Two pasts met in their glance—her woman's fault of loving too well—and his.
After a while the mere physical act of breathing fully and deeply again, the rush of the spring air, pleasantly cold, past her pallid cheeks, did their work, and unsealed the springs of joy in her own young breast—a facile joy, born of health and perfect balance, for which she had often blamed herself since the summer, ignorant of how between it, as between every function of her body, and the ascetic ideal which a heart, untimely chastened, sought to impose, there was war declared, in which she was a mere battle-ground for contending forces. It had rained hard in the forenoon. Now, level with their eyes, a belated sun flooded the suburbs with temperate gold, spilled its overflow on wet slate roofs, set bright jewels in the upper windows of gray stucco houses, and wove a filagree pattern, beaded with tender green buds in railed gardens and bristling walled shrubberies. Nothing was beneath its glorifying magic. Between the flashing tram-rails the very bed of the wide road seemed flooded with alluvial dust. A wonderful sky country, all mountain and islet-strewn tarn—such a landscape as may lie at the gate of dream-cities in the Alps—closed the prospect into which they were rushing. The wheels hummed, the six cylinders purred happily. She began to sing to herself, stretching her neck and pouting her lips, a foolish little song she had caught from one of the Dominion girls:
"I like your old French bonnet
With the ribbons on it,
And I like your cha-a-a-arming ways.
If you'll come to Parry
Then we two will marry
And our wedding march shall be the Marseillaise."