not sum up Julie amid the shifting scenes of the last few days.  She had been so loving, and yet, in a way, their love had reached no climax.  It had, indeed, reached what he would once have thought a complete and ultimate climax, but plainly Julie did not think so.  And nor did he—­now.  The things of the spirit were, after all, so much greater than the things of the flesh.  The Julie of Friday night had been his, but of this night...?  He rolled over again.  What had she meant at the play?  He told himself her tears were simple emotion, her laughter simple reaction, but he knew it was not true....

And for himself?  Well, Julie was Julie.  He loved her intensely.  She could stir him to anything almost.  He loved to be with her, to see her, to hear her, but he did not feel satisfied.  He knew that.  He told himself that he was an introspective fool; that nothing ever would seem to satisfy him; that the centre of his life was and would be Julie; that she was real, tinglingly, intensely real; but he knew that that was not the last word.  And then and there he resolved that the last word should be spoken on the morrow, that had, indeed, already come by the clock:  she should promise to marry him.

He slept, perhaps, for an hour or two, but he awoke with the dawn.  The grey light was stealing in at the windows, and Julie slept beside him in the bed between.  He tried to sleep again, but could not, and, on a sudden, had an idea.  He got quietly out of bed.

“What is it, Peter?” said Julie sleepily.

He went round and leaned over her.  “I can’t sleep any more, dearest,” he said.  “I think I’ll dress and go for a bit of a walk.  Do you mind?  I’ll be in to breakfast.”

“No,” she said.  “Go if you want to.  You are a restless old thing!”

He dressed silently, and kept the bathroom door closed as he bathed and shaved.  She was asleep again as he stole out, one arm flung loosely on the counterpane, her hair untidy on the pillow.  He kissed a lock of it, and let himself quietly out of their suite.

It was still very early, and the Circus looked empty and strange.  He walked down Piccadilly, and wondered at the clean, soft touch of the dawning day, and recalled another memorable Sunday morning walk.  He passed very familiar places, and was conscious of feeling an exile, an inevitable one, but none the less an exile, for all that.  And so he came into St. James’s Park, still as aimlessly as he had left the hotel.

Before him, clear as a pointing finger in the morning sky, was the campanile of that stranger among the great cathedrals of England.  It attracted him for the first time, and he made all but unconsciously towards it, Peter was not even in the spiritual street that leads to the gates of the Catholic Church, and it was no incipient Romanism that moved him.  He was completely ignorant of the greater part of that faith, and, still more, had no idea of the gulf that