“Did I look so upset, then?”

“George, you looked terrible.  I felt the only thing to do was for us to go out at once.”

“Oh!  But surely I wasn’t so upset as all that?” said George, finding in Marguerite’s statement a reflection upon his ability to play the part of an imperturbable man of the world.  “Agg didn’t seem to see anything.”

“Agg doesn’t know you like I do.”

She insinuated her arm into his.  He raised his hand and took hold of hers.  In the left pocket of his overcoat he could feel the somewhat unwieldy key of the studio.  He was happy.  The domestic feel of the key completed his happiness.

“Of course I can’t stay on there,” said he.

“At father’s?  Oh!  I do wish father hadn’t talked like that.”  She spoke sadly, not critically.

“I suppose I must sleep there to-night.  But I’m not going to have my breakfast there to-morrow morning.  No fear!  I’ll have it up town.  Lucas’ll be able to put me up to some new digs.  He always knows about that sort of thing.  Then I’ll drive down and remove all my worldly in a four-wheeler.”

He spoke with jauntiness, in his role of male who is easily equal to any situation.  But she said in a low, tenderly commiserating voice: 

“It’s a shame!”

“Not a bit!” he replied.  Then he suddenly stood still and brought her to a halt.  Under his erratic guidance they had turned along Dilke Street, and northwards again, past the Botanical Garden.  “And this is Paradise Row!” he said, surveying the broad street which they had come into.

“Paradise Row?” she corrected him softly.  “No, dear, it’s Queen’s Road.  It runs into Pimlico Road.”

“I mean it used to be Paradise Row,” he explained.  “It was the most fashionable street in Chelsea, you know.  Everybody that was anybody lived here.”

“Oh!  Really!” She showed an amiable desire to be interested, but her interest did not survive more than a few seconds.  “I didn’t know.  I know Paradise Walk.  It’s that horrid little passage down there on the right.”

She had not the historic sense; and she did not understand his mood, did not in the slightest degree suspect that events had been whipping his ambition once more, and that at that moment he was enjoying the seventeenth and even the sixteenth centuries, and thinking of Sir Thomas More and Miss More, and all manner of grandiose personages and abodes, and rebelling obstinately against the fact, that he was as yet a nonentity in Chelsea, whereas he meant in the end to yield to nobody in distinction and renown.  He knew that she did not understand, and he would not pretend to himself that she did.  There was no reason why she should understand.  He did not particularly want her to understand.

“Let’s have a look at the river, shall we?” he suggested, and they moved towards Cheyne Walk.

“Dearest,” she said, “you must come and have breakfast at the studio to-morrow morning.  I shall get it myself.”