"Oh, Len," she whispered, pulling at his arm, "I love all these people; I love England."
He smiled indulgently.
"They're all right," he assented; "I don't mind strangers, but I hate the thought of all the relatives we've got to face when we get back. There'll be Aunt Hortense and Uncle Charles. Mater'll have all the uncles and the cousins and the aunts in to bid me a tender farewell. Think of spending my last evening with you answering questions about how deep the mud is in the trenches, and what we get to eat, and what the names of all the officers in my mess are."
"And then they'll spend the rest of our precious time connecting them up to people of the same name in England," said Marjorie.
"Exactly," agreed Leonard. "Aren't grown-up relations beastly?"
"Horrible," said Marjorie, "but they've been awfully decent about letting me have you all of these four days."
To put off the evil moment of arrival they stopped at every shop-window and stared in, their faces pressed close to the glass.
All the way home, with eyes that neither saw nor cared where they were going, they talked to each other of their childhood. The most trivial incidents became magnified and significant when exchanged.
"That's just the way I used to feel, that's just the way I used to feel," they kept repeating, over and over again. The sweet, misty memories of their happy, happy lives, came gliding back into consciousness. The thoughts and yearnings, the smells, the sights and sounds, all the serenity of the immaculate, long childhood days. Walking side by side in the reverent dimness, intensely conscious of each other, they had that mysterious sensation of having done this before, of living a second time. The world was transfigured; they were aware of measureless rapture brooding close about them in the twilight of which they were a part—a rapture, a sense of enchantment, that people are only conscious of as children or when they are in love or in dreams.
Finally, deliciously weary, and full of the languor of the summer night, they retraced their steps and took the two-penny tube.