“Scotland bigger than England!” he jeered.  “Think of the map!  Bigger than England!”

She thought of the map, and for a minute her mouth was a little round dismayed hole.  But she was not to be beaten.  “I was alluding to its surface,” she said coldly.  “It being such an elevated country, there must be many square miles standing practically on end, thus taking hardly any space on the map.  Consequently I was correct in saying that Scotland is bigger than England.”  She drew breath to go on, but her lips began to twitch and her eyes to seek his half-ashamedly, and then she began to giggle at her own sophistry and was not angry when he joined her.  They built a little bright vibrant cave in the night with their laughter, from which they did not wish to move.  They were standing quite still on the broad pavement, staring intently at each other’s faces, trying to remember the reality under the distortions painted by the strong moonlight.  It was a precious moment of intimacy, and they did not quite know what to do with it.  They did not even know whether to be grave or gay.  It was as if they held between them a sheet of shot tissue and could not decide whether to hold it up to the light and show its merry rosy colour or let it sag and glow rich gold.

But indeed they had no choice.  For he found himself saying huskily, “I didn’t mean to be rude.  I had forgotten you were Scotch.  You’re a person all by yourself.  One doesn’t think of you as belonging to any country.”

“Well, of course,” she murmured, “father was Irish; but he was just an expense.”

He choked back a laugh.  But this sense that she was funny did not blur the romantic quality of his love for her any more than this last manifestation of her funniness spoiled the clear beauty of her face, which now, in this moonlight that painted black shadows under her high cheek-bones, was candid and alert like the face of a narcissus.  “I didn’t mean to be rude,” he repeated.  “I didn’t think that what I said could possibly touch you.  As if I could say anything about you that wasn’t....”  His voice cracked like a boy’s.  He felt an agony of tenderness towards her, and a terrifying sense that love was not all delight.  It was stripping him of the armour of hardness and self-possession that it had been the business of his adult years to acquire, and it was leaving him the raw and smarting substance, accessible and attractive to pain, that he had not been since he was a boy.

And it was all to no purpose.  For nothing seemed more likely than that Ellen should look up at him fixedly and fully assume that expression of wisdom which sometimes intruded into the youth in her eyes; that she should say in a new deep voice, “You are not good enough for me.”  And of course it would be true, it would be true.  Then she would walk on and turn the corner to her home, and he would be left alone among these desolate tall houses, eternally hungry.  He could imagine how she would look as