It was then Nicholas bent back her head as he did when he kissed her there on the swan’s arch to her neck, only this time his palm was against her forehead and his other between her shoulder blades.

“I could kill you,” he said, and laughed with his teeth.  “I could bend back your neck until it breaks.”

“Ni—­i—­Nic—­ky—­”

“And I want to,” he said through the star-spangled red.  “I want you to crack when I twist.  I’m going to twist—­twist—­”

And he did, shoving back her hair with his palm, and suddenly bared, almost like a grimace, up at him, was the glass-shotted spot where the wine tumbler had ground in, greenish now, like the flanges of her nostrils.

Somewhere—­down a dear brow was a singed spot like that—­singed with the flame of pain—­

“Nicky, for God’s sake—­you’re—­you’re spraining my neck!  Let go!  Nicky.  God! if you hadn’t let go just when you did.  You had me croaking.  Nicky-boy—­kiss me now and go!  Go!  To-morrow at six—­clear for you—­always—­only go—­please, boy—­my terrible—­my wonderful.  To-morrow at six.”

Somehow he was walking home, the burn of her lips still against his, loathsome and gorgeous to his desires.  He wanted to tear her out by the roots from his consciousness.  To be rollickingly, cleanly free of her.  His teeth shone against the darkness as he walked, drenched to the skin of his perspiration and one side of his collar loose, the buttonhole slit.

Rollickingly free of her and yet how devilishly his shoes could clat on the sidewalk.

To-morrow at six.  To-morrow at six.  To-morrow at six.

* * * * *

It was some time after midnight when he let himself into the uptown apartment.  He thought he heard his mother, trying to be swift, padding down the hallway as if she had been waiting near the door.  That would have angered him.

The first of these nights, only four weeks before (it seemed years), he had come in hotly about four o’clock and gone to bed.  About five he thought he heard sounds, almost like the scratch of a little dog at his door.  He sprang up and flung it open.  The flash of his mother’s gray-flannelette wrapper turned a corner of the hall.  She must have been crying out there and wanting him to need her.  None the less it had angered him.  These were men’s affairs.

But in his room to-night the light burned placidly on the little table next to the bed, a glass of milk on a plate beside it.  The bed was turned back, snowy sheets forming a cool envelope for him to slip in between.  The room lay sedatively in shadow.  A man’s room.  Books, uncurving furniture, photographs of his parents taken on their twenty-fifth anniversary standing on the chiffonier in a double leather frame that opened like a book.  Face down on the reading table beside the glass of milk, quite as he must have left it the night before, except where Sara had lifted it to dust under, a copy of Bishop’s New Criminal Law, already a prognosis, as it were, of that branch of the law he was ultimately and brilliantly to bend to fuller justice.