Out in the streets they paused.  A theatre or any place of amusement was out of the question, for Cicely dared not stay out later than half-past nine.  Then a luminous idea came to Douglas.

“Why on earth shouldn’t you come to my rooms?” he asked.  “I can give you some decent coffee and read you the first chapter of my novel.”

She hesitated, but barely for a moment.

“It sounds delightful,” she admitted.  “I’ll come.  Glad to.  Isn’t it lovely to be in this great city, and to know what freedom is—­to do what seems well and hear nothing of that everlasting ’other people say’?”

“It’s magnificent,” he answered.

He beckoned a hansom, handed her in, and somehow forgot to release her hand.  The wheels were rubber-tyred and the springs easy.  They glided into the sea of traffic with scarcely a sense of movement.

“Life,” he said, “is full of new sensations,” holding her fingers a little tighter.

“It is our extreme youth,” she murmured, gently but firmly withdrawing them.  “In a year’s time all this will seem crude to you.”

“In a year’s time,” he answered, looking down at her, suddenly thoughtful, “I will remind you of that speech.”

She sighed, but her gravity was only for a moment.  She was chattering again gaily by the time they reached the street where Douglas’s rooms were.  He led her up the stairs, ill-carpeted and narrow.  His room had never seemed so small and shabby as when at last they reached it and he threw the door open.

She walked at once to the window.  The Houses of Parliament, Westminster, the Thames, were all visible.  A hundred lights flashed upon the embankments and across the bridges, away opposite, a revolving series of illuminations proclaimed the surpassing quality of a well-known whiskey.  Westwards, a glow of fire hung over the city from Leicester Square and the theatres.  She gazed at it all, fascinated.

“What a wonderful view, Douglas!” she exclaimed.  He rose up, hot from his struggles with a refractory lamp, and came to her side.  A sound of bubbling and a pleasant smell of coffee proclaimed the result of his labours.

“I have never yet tired of looking at it,” he answered.  “I have no blind, as you see, and at night I have had my writing-table here and the window open.  Listen.”

He threw up the sash.  A deep, monotonous roar, almost like the incoming tide of the sea, fell upon their ears.

“You hear it,” he said.  “That is life, that rolling of wheels, the falling of a thousand footsteps upon the pavement, men and women going to their pleasures, the outcasts and the parasites bearing them company.  It is like the sea.  It is always there.  It is the everbeating pulse of humanity.”

He closed the window and led her to an easy chair.

“Cissy,” he said, “do you know, this is what we always talked of, that I should write a story and read it first to you?  Do you remember?”