I only remembered that I still had the key of the little house in my pocket as we pushed and jostled through the crowded town of striped canvas that covered the Lower Heath. My fingers encountered it as we took a back way behind a long fluttering sheet against which cocoanut balls smacked every moment. It was necessary to return with it; and, as men behind the lace-curtained caravans began to make ready the naphtha lights for the evening, we turned into another thoroughfare down which the purple and lamb's-wool and lavender and bright neckerchiefs poured as if down a river-bed. In twenty minutes we had reached the tea-garden again; I spied a couple in the act of leaving a leafy arbour that held a table awash with spilt beer; and I put Evie into a still warm seat and bade her hold it against all comers. I left her, and presently returned with two glasses, of which I had managed to retain the greater part of the contents; and I sat down by her.
"Did you give them the key?" she asked, seizing my arm.
"Yes, I gave them 'the' key. I'm going to see the agent to-morrow."
"Oh, Jeff!" She said it as if there was something miraculous in it that an agent might actually consent to be seen about that little house on the morrow.
"That is, unless to-morrow's a holiday too."
"Oh, you must go!" she broke out. "It would be too awful if we were to miss it!"
Then, as a waiter came with a sopping cloth to wipe down the table, we ceased to talk.
Already they were beginning to light up everywhere. The crowded garden became a complexity of ceaselessly moving shadows with a hundred little accidents of light—the flames of sudden matches, yellow shafts as people moved aside from windows, the twinkling festoons of the arbours, the gleam of liquid spilt on tables. A glow like that of a furnace rose behind the trees in front of us, and over the tree-tops rose swinging boats, sometimes one, sometimes two or three at a time, with lads standing with bent knees on the seats and the girls' feathers tossing and boas flying in the golden haze. The noise became a ceaseless twanging everywhere, and I watched with amusement a half-drunk but wholly happy sailor at the next table, who nodded sleepily from time to time, then looked with wideawake and amiable defiance about him, and had quite forgotten that he wore his companion's hat hearsed with black feathers.
"Do you want to change hats?" I said to Evie, with a glance at her pheasants' feather toque.
"No—but——" I saw her own glance at the sailor's thick wrist, which had appeared on our side of his companion.