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Shall I like it? Have you been there?”
    “Oh, yes, I know it quite well.”
    “Shall I like it?”
    “I don’t know, my dear. Anyhow you ought to go down if Miss Fane asks you.”
    Laura nodded reluctantly.
    “I suppose I ought.” She brightened. “Perhaps she won’t ask me.”
    The afternoon went by. They saw a play, but in each of them the current of thought and feeling ran too strong to leave any but the most surface attention free. Each was too conscious of the other to know what was passing on the stage. There was light, and colour, and music. The players came and went and said their lines. The curtain rose and fell. And all the time the unseen current ran like a race.
    They came out into the dark and found a taxi. Blackness shut them in. Carey said suddenly,
    “They don’t know whether I shall be able to fly again.”
    Something in his voice brought Laura out of her dreams. She said in the quick, soft way she had,
    “Oh—why?”
    “That crash—it’s done something to my sight. I can’t judge distances any more.”
    “You’ll get all right—I’m sure you will.”
    “I may. It’s one of those things they don’t know about. It’s hell.”
    She put out her hand and found his.
    “You’ll get all right—I know you will.”
    They sat like that with the dark going by them. Neither of them spoke. When the taxi stopped and they were standing under Cousin Sophy’s porch, he broke the silence to say,
    “No one knows except you.”
    Laura didn’t say anything. She put out her hand again in a groping gesture. It brushed his arm, and suddenly he was holding it to his face, kissing it.
    “Laura! Laura!”
    She reached out and held him.
    “Don’t mind like that! Oh, Carey, please!”
    “I’m a fool—I’ve no right—”
    She shook him a little, or tried to.
    “You’re not to talk like that! I won’t have it! You’ve got to be sensible and give yourself a chance. Why, it isn’t any time yet. You’ve been worried—strung-up. You haven’t given yourself a chance.” But in her heart she was saying, “Tanis hasn’t given him a chance.”
    She came very near to hating Tanis then. It was like coming near to the open mouth of a furnace. The heat rushed out. It took her breath and blinded her. She shrank in the wind of it, and was afraid.
    Carey felt her tremble. She put up her face to his, and when he touched it it was wet. She said through tears,
    “Please, Carey, please! It’s going to be all right.”
    chapter 7
    Cousin Sophy was on her sofa in the drawing-room in a panoply of shawls. There was one from Galloway in shades of blue and green. It was really more of a rug than a shawl, and was dedicated to covering her to the waist. “I took such a fancy to it when I was travelling with my dear father, and it has worn remarkably well—such pure wool, and of course only vegetable dyes. It always reminds me of the colour of the sea and the hills—such a wild coast—just the same blue and green.” There was another shawl at the slender waist, a wisp of violet and grey, and a grey silk shawl with a knotted fringe for the frail shoulders. There was also a supplementary one of heavy pale blue wool, crocheted by Miss Sophy herself, and one rather smaller in white wool to put over the head when a window was opened to air the room.
    From all this shawlery Miss Ferrers extended a pair of eager, fluttering hands.
    “Oh, my dear Laura—I am so glad! Have you enjoyed yourself?”
    Laura said, “Yes, very much.” She had the feeling that she stood in a cloud of joy—a glowing cloud, bright with the sun.
    “I am so glad you have come in, and so glad you have enjoyed yourself too. But oh, my dear, Agnes Fane has been telephoning. She wants you to go down there—tomorrow, I think. She says Tanis Lyle is taking down a party of young people, and she thought it would be a pleasant way of making your acquaintance.”
    The brightness failed suddenly. Laura didn’t know why. She felt cold without it. The