“But Agg won’t like me poking my nose in for breakfast.”

“You great silly!  Don’t you know she simply adores you?”

He was certainly startled by this remark, and he began to like Agg.

“Old Agg!  Not she!” he protested, pleased, but a little embarrassed.  “Will she be up?”

“You’ll see whether she’ll be up or not.  Nine o’clock’s the time, isn’t it?”

They reached the gardens of Cheyne Walk.  Three bridges hung their double chaplets of lights over the dark river.  On the southern shore the shapes of high trees waved mysteriously above the withdrawn woodland glades that in daytime were Battersea Park.  Here and there a tiny red gleam gave warning that a pier jutted out into the stream; but nothing moved on the water.  The wind that swept clean the pavements had unclouded ten million stars.  It was a wind unlike any other wind that ever blew, at once caressing and roughly challenging.  The two, putting it behind them, faced eastward, and began to pass one by one the innumerable ornate gas-lamps of Chelsea Embankment, which stretched absolutely rectilinear in front of them for a clear mile.  No soul but themselves was afoot.  But on the left rose gigantic and splendid houses, palaces designed by modern architects, vying with almost any houses in London, some dark, others richly illuminated and full of souls luxurious, successful, and dominant.  As the girl talked creatively about the breakfast, her arm pressed his, and his fingers clasped her acquiescent fingers, and her chaste and confiding passion ran through him in powerful voltaic currents from some inexhaustible source of energy in her secret heart.  It seemed to him that since their ride home in the hansom from the Promenade concert her faculty for love had miraculously developed.  He divined great deeps in her, and deeps beyond those deeps.  The tenderness which he felt for her was inexpressible.  He said not a word, keeping to himself the terrific resolves to which she, and the wind, and the spectacular majesty of London inspired him.  He and she would live regally in one of those very houses, and people should kowtow to her because she was the dazzling wife of the renowned young architect, George Cannon.  And he would show her to Mrs. John Orgreave and to Lois, and those women should acknowledge in her a woman incomparably their superior.  They should not be able to hide their impressed astonishment when they saw her.

Nothing of all this did he impart to her as she hung supported and inspiring on his arm.  He held it all in reserve for her.  And then, thinking again for a moment of what she had said about Agg’s liking for him, he thought of Agg’s picture and of Marguerite’s design which had originated the picture.  It was a special design, new for Marguerite, whose bindings were generally of conventional patterns; it was to be paid for at a special price because of its elaborateness; she had worked on it for nearly two days; in particular she had stayed indoors