always strolled through tessellated halls beside young men in flannels.

Her spirit sank a little at the sight of the slim-waisted waitresses in
black, with bewitching mob-caps on their haughty heads, who were moving
disdainfully between the tables. "Not f'r another hour," one of them
dropped to Harney in passing; and he stood doubtfully glancing about
him.

"Oh, well, we can't stay sweltering here," he decided; "let's try
somewhere else--" and with a sense of relief Charity followed him from
that scene of inhospitable splendour.

That "somewhere else" turned out--after more hot tramping, and several
failures--to be, of all things, a little open-air place in a back street
that called itself a French restaurant, and consisted in two or three
rickety tables under a scarlet-runner, between a patch of zinnias
and petunias and a big elm bending over from the next yard. Here they
lunched on queerly flavoured things, while Harney, leaning back in a
crippled rocking-chair, smoked cigarettes between the courses and poured
into Charity's glass a pale yellow wine which he said was the very same
one drank in just such jolly places in France.

Charity did not think the wine as good as sarsaparilla, but she sipped a
mouthful for the pleasure of doing what he did, and of fancying herself
alone with him in foreign countries. The illusion was increased by their
being served by a deep-bosomed woman with smooth hair and a pleasant
laugh, who talked to Harney in unintelligible words, and seemed amazed
and overjoyed at his answering her in kind. At the other tables other
people sat, mill-hands probably, homely but pleasant looking, who spoke
the same shrill jargon, and looked at Harney and Charity with friendly