“It seems a pity,” she said; and then the eyes in the shadow of the brim seemed to open wide, wide.
“You see?” she whispered. “You see?”
But I could see nothing but her silhouette against the future days. I said: “We have begun at the wrong end; but can’t we work back?”
“Oh, no!” she whispered. “It is not like that a bit. You don’t understand....”
Suddenly I said many things.
She seemed, her hand still in mine, to be absorbed in something just behind my right shoulder. There was such fear in her eyes that I cried sharply: “What is it?”
“The beast,” said the lips of the eyes of fear. “Just the beast....”
The word I said was drowned in the din of a lorry that smashed through Whitehorse Street to Piccadilly. She took her hand gently from mine. “There is a dream,” she said, “and there is a beast.”
She smiled.
“That’s all,” she said.