She opened to him, and in a close, speechless embrace they leaned against the inner side of the door till the catch went home. Louis knew without asking that they were alone together in the house.

But Joanna, drawing back for a moment, saw that in his face which she would never quite forget or forgive, a look of shame. In spite of all he had said to her, he was ashamed. There it was in his face warring with his delight, and by this dastard shame of his she herself for a moment was betrayed, was besmirched. True, it was only for a moment. In the radiance of her welcome and her giving the deadly thing passed from him. He became free, simple, exultant as herself. Still she had seen it; and all night it lurked like a foul wolf outside the room she had prepared, the firelit, secret room where the lovers were creatures of pure magic to each other.

Later, when she lay at rest in his hands, Joanna, still awake, was lapped strangely about by thoughts of death. Now death showed as beautiful to her as life, life as terrible as death. And she seemed to hold the secret of existence between her hollowed palms. It was a secret at once so stupendous and so simple that she wondered she had been so long of finding it out.

But soon her thoughts became confused, incongruous. The glowing coals crumbled downwards on the hearth with a quiet grating sound. The ceiling leapt to an arch of guarding flame. Flames like sentinels sprang into being around the walls. They kept all shameful wolves away with their brandished swords. Whatever was to come after, she and Louis could sleep unscathed here. This innermost chamber, the very kernel of fire was their safe hiding place.

CHAPTER FIVE

I

What followed was a path into the unknown, and a path unexpectedly solitary.

It surprised, at first it frightened her that she was to get so little help from Louis. Without a doubt his presumed greater knowledge of life had been one of the powerful elements attracting her to him. With his advantages of age, experience, circumstances, he seemed to her to move surely in that fabulous world of mammon for which she had so hungered as a child and had not yet attained. For her he personified not only that for which the little green door in the wall of La Porziuncola had stood as the symbol, but also the finely decked luncheon table of Aunt Georgina. And between these two extremes of illicit adventure and conventional elegance (utterly dependent as they are one upon the other) lay the whole wondrous realm which is Society, which is aestheticism, which is history, which is the multi-coloured, solid-seeming fruit of human civilization. For a complexity of reasons, provincial and individual, the girl had always felt herself deprived of this traditional world. Now in Louis she was to possess it.