"Rather. We run together. You'll see how it's done."
Miss Usher thought she saw.
And they ran in it together, Ransome with Winny before him, turning from him, parting from him, flying from him, and returning to him again. Always with the same soft pad of her feet, the same swaying of her sturdy, slender body, the same rising and falling on her shoulders of her childish door-knocker plat.
Winny was a child; that was all that could be said of her; and he, he was a man, grown up suddenly in a single night.
He ran, perfunctorily, through all the foolish turnings and windings of the maze. He put his hands on Winny's waist to guide her when, in her excitement, she went wrong. He linked his arm with hers when they ran locked, shoulder to shoulder, in the Great Wheel; but it was as if he held and caught, and was locked together with a child. Winny's charm was gone; and with it gone the sense of tenderness and absurdity; gone the magic and the madness of the running. For in Ranny's heart there was another magic and another madness. And it was as if Life itself had caught him and locked him with a woman in the whirling of its Great Wheel.
CHAPTER IX
He haunted that door in the shutter more than ever in the hope of seeing Violet Usher. Not that he wanted to haunt it. It was as if, set his feet southward as he would, they were turned back irresistibly and drawn eastward in the direction of the door.
There was nothing furtive and secret in his haunting. He had a right to hang about Starker's, for he knew Miss Usher now. He had been formally introduced to her by Winny as they left the Polytechnic together, on the night of the Grand Display. Winny, preoccupied with her own performance on the parallel bars, had remained unaware of their communion in the gallery, and Violet Usher had evidently judged it best to say nothing about their previous interviews.