THE EVIL THAT MEN DO—
not only lived with him but liked him. At what date, in fact, had she ceased liking Harold? Had she ever———?
She put her fingers quickly in her ears as though somebody had uttered the guilty thing aloud.
Seating herself at the writing-table, she shut her eyes and thoughtfully stroked her eyebrows with the pink feather at the tip of a synthetic quill pen. She drew the feather slowly down the line of one cheek and tickled herself under the chin with it, a delightful sensation productive of shivers.
"Oh," she sighed, with a shuddering breath, "how beautiful, beautiful you are."
The top of a bus, lurching and rattling through obscurer London, the cold air blowing on her throat, moments under lighted windows when their faces had been mutually discernible, the sudden apparition of the conductor which had made him withdraw his hands from her wrist, their conversation—which she had forgotten. . . . "Ride, ride together, for ever ride." . . . When the bus stopped they had got down and got on to another. She did not remember where
169
