Ewan met in with Ellen the evening of the next day, going up to her room, and they stopped close and smiled on the dark stair’s turn. And a queer, sharp pang shot through Ewan’s heart looking down on the sailing thought-shapes in her eyes, far down deep in the sweet kitten face. And he’d kissed her only once in his life!

Trembling, he put his hands under her arms, the lights changed to a hurrying, twinkling flurry, they kissed and quivered a minute together, and stood breathing, listening, and kissed again.

He said, mimicking her English phrase That was fun! and she flashed back I’ve known worse! and slipped from him: looked down from the step above: Coming out a walk?

He said he’d just come in; and anyhow it was raining like—She nodded, Like hell, but I like the rain. Don’t you?

He put up his hand on hers on the stair-rail and felt the quiver of blood in her fingers: I like you at any rate, and stared at the fingers so that Ellen whispered Aren’t they clean? And pulled them away and ruffled his hair: There, I’ll be ready in less than a minute.

She was ready in ten and they went out together to the windy squall of the February night, a flicker and flow of wet lights and sounds. He asked where they’d go and she said Doughty Park, and they made that in a little under twelve minutes, wide open heath that lay furth of the toun, the great trees shoomed and pattered to the rain, they passed two bobbies with glistening capes and came under the shelter of a strumming beech. Here the lads of Duncairn would take their lasses on summer nights, fair scandalous, and behave to them in that scandalous way that first had launched humankind on the globe. But this night was a treey desolation, rain-pelted, Ewan remembered that night of the year before when they’d gone that walk to the Beach and stripped and splashed a mad dip in the sea. He asked Ellen if she minded as well, she was close beside him, snuggled in the lithe.

Yes. Goodness, how silly we were! Dirty little tykes…. Oh, Ewan, listen to the wind!

So he listened, but only with half an ear. That night on the Beach—what had been dirty about it? Ellen said Didn’t you want to see me naked? I did you; but I didn’t say. That was why it was dirty, you know. And thought: No, I don’t suppose you did, funny Ewan.

She was silent for a long while after that, leaning up against him, hearing the rain, content and content, she could stay there all night. She said so and Ewan said he could as well, only he mightn’t be so funny this time. And at that she said, sobered, that she didn’t suppose he would, it was damnable for him to have fallen in love, much better to have stayed out safe and sound so’s he didn’t much care what she looked, how she was. And now—