ostentatiously and lifted my school cap and spoke to them.

The girl answered shyly with her dark eyes on my face. What I said
and what she said I cannot remember, but I have little doubt it was
something absolutely vapid. It really did not matter; the thing was
we had met. I felt as I think a new-hatched moth must feel when
suddenly its urgent headlong searching brings it in tremulous
amazement upon its mate.

We met, covered from each other, with all the nets of civilisation
keeping us apart. We walked side by side.

It led to scarcely more than that. I think we met four or five
times altogether, and always with her nearly silent elder sister on
the other side of her. We walked on the last two occasions arm in
arm, furtively caressing each other's hands, we went away from the
glare of the shops into the quiet roads of villadom, and there we
whispered instead of talking and looked closely into one another's
warm and shaded face. "Dear," I whispered very daringly, and she
answered, "Dear!" We had a vague sense that we wanted more of that
quality of intimacy and more. We wanted each other as one wants
beautiful music again or to breathe again the scent of flowers.

And that is all there was between us. The events are nothing, the
thing that matters is the way in which this experience stabbed
through the common stuff of life and left it pierced, with a light,
with a huge new interest shining through the rent.

When I think of it I can recall even now the warm mystery of her
face, her lips a little apart, lips that I never kissed, her soft