They went to bed; Barry and Kay to the room they had got above a public house, Nan and Gerda to Nan’s room at the cafe, where they squeezed into one bed.

Gerda slept, lying very straight and still, as was her habit in sleep.  Nan lay wakeful and restless, watching the moonlight steal across the floor and lie palely on the bed and on Gerda’s waxen face and yellow hair.  The pretty, pale child, strange in sleep, like a little mermaiden lost on earth.  Nan, sitting up in bed, one dark plait hanging over each shoulder, watched her with brooding amber eyes.  How young she was, how very, very young.  It was touching to be so young.  Yet why, when youth was, people said, the best time?  It wasn’t really touching to be young; it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left.  Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty and heartbreaking to be sixty.  As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went home to bed.  That was touching; Mrs. Hilary and Grandmama were touching.  Not Gerda and Kay, with their dance just beginning.

A bore, this sharing one bed.  You couldn’t sleep, however small and quiet your companion lay.  They must get a bed each, when they could, during this tour.  One must sleep.  If one didn’t one began to think.  Every time Nan forced herself to the edge of sleep, a picture sprang sharply before her eyes—­the flaming sky and sea, herself and Barry standing together on the causeway.

“Aren’t you glad you came?” Her own voice, soft, encouraging.

“I should say so!” The quick, matter-of-fact answer.

Then a pause and she turning on him the beginnings of a smile.  An allowing, inviting ... seductive ... smile.

And he, smiling too, but not at her, looking away to where Gerda and Kay walked bare-legged to the Mount.

Flame scorched her again.  The pause each time she saw it now became longer, more deliberate, more inviting, more emptily unfilled.  Her smile became more luring, his more rejecting.  As she saw it now, in the cruel, distorting night, he had seen her permission and refused it.  By day she had known that simple Barry had seen nothing; by day she would know it again.  Between days are set nights of white, searing flame, two in a bed so that one cannot sleep.  Damn Gerda, lying there so calm and cool.  It had been a mistake to ask Gerda to come; if it hadn’t been for Gerda they wouldn’t have been two in a bed.

“Barry’s a good deal taken up with her just now,” said Nan to herself, putting it into plain, deliberate words, as was her habit with life’s situations.  “He does get taken up with pretty girls, I suppose, when he’s thrown with them.  All men do, if you come to that.  For the moment he’s thinking about her, not about me.  That’s a bore.  It will bore me to death if it goes on....  I wonder how long it will go on?  I wonder how soon he’ll want to make love to me again?”