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he lives,” thought Margot, her elbows resting on the table. “Perhaps after all he is not really wealthy, and it’s not worth my while to bother about him. Or shall I risk it?”
    The next morning at exactly the same time she rang him up again. Elisabeth was in her bath. Albinus spoke almost in a whisper with his eye on the door. Although sick with fear, he was madly happy to be forgiven.
    “My darling,” he murmured, “my darling.”
    “Say, what time will wifey be away from home?” she asked laughing.
    “I’m afraid I don’t know,” he answered with a cold shiver. “Why?”
    “I’d like to drop in for a moment.”
    He was silent. Somewhere a door opened.
    “I can’t go on talking,” murmured Albinus.
    “If I come to you I might kiss you.”
    “Today, I don’t know. No,” he stammered, “I don’t think it’s feasible. If I suddenly ring off don’t be surprised. I shall see you tonight, and then we’ll …” He hung up and sat for some time motionless, listening to the pounding of his heart. “I suppose I am a coward,” he thought. “She’s sure to dawdle in the bathroom for another half hour.”
    “One small request,” he said to Margot when they met. “Let’s take a taxi.”
    “An open one,” said Margot.
    “No, that’s too dangerous. I promise you I’ll behave,” he added as he gazed lovingly at her childishly upturned face which looked very white in the blaze of the street lamp.
    “Listen,” he began when they were seated in the cab. “First I am not angry with you, of course, for ringing me up, but I beg you, I implore you, not to do it again, my darling, my precious.” (“That’s better,” thought Margot.)
    “And secondly, tell me how you found out my name?”
    She lied, quite needlessly, telling him that a woman she knew had seen them in the street together and knew him too.
    “Who was it?” asked Albinus with horror.
    “Oh, just a working woman. I think one of her sisters was once cook or housemaid in your family.”
    Albinus racked his memory despairingly.
    “Anyway, I told her she was wrong. I’m a smart little girl.”
    The darkness inside the taxi slid and swayed as quarters and halves and whole squares of ashen light passed from window to window across it. Margot was sitting so near that he felt the blissful animal warmth of her body. “I shall die or go off my head if I can’t have her,” thought Albinus.
    “And thirdly,” he said aloud, “find yourself lodgings, say two or three rooms and a kitchen—that is, upon condition that you let me visit you occasionally.”
    “Albert, have you already forgotten what I suggested this morning?”
    “But it’s so risky,” groaned Albinus. “You see … Tomorrow, for instance, I’ll be alone from about four to six, but one never knows what may happen …” and he pictured to himself how his wife might come back for something she had forgotten.
    “But I’ve told you I’d kiss you,” said Margot softly, “and then, you know, there’s not a thing in the world that can’t be explained away somehow.”
    So next day, when Elisabeth and Irma had gone out for tea, he sent Frieda the maid (it was cook’s day out, luckily) on a good long errand with a couple of books to deliver miles away.
    Now he was alone. His watch had stopped some minutes ago, but the clock in the dining room was exact and then, too, by craning out of the window he could see the church clock. A quarter past four. It was a bright windy day in mid-April. On the sunlit wall of the opposite house the fast shadow of smoke ran sideways from the shadow of a chimney. The asphalt was drying patchily after a recent shower, the damp still showing in the form of grotesque black skeletons as if painted across the width of the road.
    Half past four. She might come at any minute.
    Whenever he thought of Margot’s slim girlish figure, her silky skin, the touch of her funny, ill-kept little hands, he felt a rush of desire which was almost painful.