"Isn't it good? Have another sweet?"
"Well, thanks, I don't mind. Are you enjoying yourself, kiddie?"
"Awfully. I like pictures."
"What about me? Don't you like me a little bit too, Elsie, for bringing you?" His voice had become low and husky.
Still under the emotional influence of the story, the music, and the relaxation produced by bodily warmth and comfort, she looked at him, and saw, not the common, rather negligible features of sandy-haired Mr. Roberts, but the bold, handsome American hero of the film.
"Of course I like you," she said softly.
"You won't forget me when I've gone?"
"No."
"You will, Elsie! You'll let some other fellow take you to the pictures, and you won't give me another thought."
"Of course I shall, you silly! I shall always remember you—you've been awfully sweet to me."
"Will you write to me?"
"We'll see about that."
"Promise."
"Promises are like pie-crusts, made to be broken."
"Yours wouldn't be. I bet anything if you promised a chap something, you'd stick to it. Now wouldn't you?"
"I daresay I should," she murmured, flattered. "Mother says I've always been a terrible one for keeping to what I've once said. It's the way I am, you know."
No fleeting suspicion crossed her mind that this was anything but a true description of herself.
"Elsie, do you know what I should like to do?"
"What, Mr. Roberts?"
"Call me Norman. I should like to make a hell of a lot of money and come back and marry you."
"You shouldn't use those words."
"I'm in earnest, Elsie."
"You're making very free with my name, aren't you?"
"You don't mind."
"No," she whispered.
"You're a little darling."
The lights went out again, and his hand fumbled for hers in the darkness. Warm and unresisting it lay in his, and presently returned pressure for pressure.
The story on the screen began to threaten tragedy, and Elsie's body became tense with anxiety. She pressed her shoulder hard against that of Roberts.
He, too, leant towards her, and presently slipped one arm round her waist. Instantly her senses were awake, and although she continued to gaze at the screen, she was in reality blissfully preoccupied only with his embrace, and the sensations it aroused in her.
Intensely desirous that he should not move away, she relaxed her figure more and more, letting her head rest at last against his shoulder. She began to wonder whether he would kiss her, and to feel that she wanted him to do so. As though she had communicated the thought to him, the man beside her in the obscurity put his disengaged hand under her chin and tilted her face to his.
She did not resist, and he kissed her, first on her soft cheek and then on her mouth.
Elsie had been kissed before, roughly and teasingly by boys, and once or twice, furtively, by an elderly lodger of Mrs. Palmer's, whose breath had smelt of whisky.
But the kisses of this young commercial traveller were of an entirely different quality to these, and the pleasure that she took in them was new and startling to herself.
"Elsie, d'you love me?" he whispered. "I love you. I think you're the sweetest little girl in the whole world."
Elsie liked the words vaguely, but she did not really want him to talk, she wanted him to go on kissing her.
"Say—' I love you, Norman.'"
"I won't."
"You must. Why won't you?" It's so soppy.
"Elsie!"
She felt that the magnetic current between them had been disturbed, and made an instinctive, nestling movement against him.
He kissed her again, two or three times.
Reluctantly, Elsie forced herself to the realisation that the film must soon come to an end, and the lights reappear.
She looked at the screen again, and when the lovers, in magnified presentment, exchanged a long embrace, responsive vibrations shook her, and she felt all the elation of conscious and recent initiation.
The lights suddenly flashed out, a moment sooner than she expected them, and she flung herself across into her own seat, pressing the backs of her hands against her flushed, burning cheeks and dazzled eyes.
She knew that Norman Roberts was looking at her, but she would not turn her head and meet his eyes, partly from shyness, and partly from coquetry.
"Isn't this the end?" she said, knowing that it was not, but speaking in order to relieve her sense of embarrassment.
"No, it isn't over till half-past ten; there's another forty minutes yet." He consulted his wrist-watch elaborately. "I expect they'll have a comic to finish up with."
Elsie sensed constraint in him, too, and in sudden alarm turned and faced him. As their eyes met, both of them smiled and flushed, and Roberts slipped his arm under hers and possessed himself of her hand again.
"Did you like that?" he whispered, bending towards her.
"The picture?" " You know I don't mean that." She laughed and then nodded.
"Elsie, tell me something truly. Has any other fellow ever kissed you?"
Her first impulse was to lie glibly. Then her natural, instinctive understanding of the game on which they were engaged, made her laugh teasingly. "That's telling, Mr. Inquisitive."
"That means they have. I must say, Elsie, that considering you're only sixteen, I don't call that very nice." Elsie snatched away her hand. "I get quite enough of that sort of thing at home, thank you, Mr. Norman Roberts, Esquire. There's no call for you to interfere in my concerns, that I'm aware of."
His instant alarm gratified her, although she continued to look offended, and to sit very upright in her chair.
"Don't be angry, Elsie. I didn't mean to offend you, honour bright. Make it up!"
The pianist began some rattling dance-music and the lights went out again.
Elsie immediately relaxed her pose, feeling her heart beat more quickly in mingled doubt and anticipation.
The doubt was resolved almost within the instant. Roberts pulled her towards him, bringing her face close to his, and whispered :
"Kiss and be friends!"
All the while that the last film was showing, Elsie lay almost in his arms, seeing nothing at all, conscious only of feeling alive as she had never felt alive before.
Even when it was all over and they rose to go, that sense of awakened vitality throbbed within her, and made her unaware of fatigue.
"Follow me," said Roberts authoritatively, and took his place in front of her in the gangway. There he waited, meekly and like everybody else, until the people in front should have moved. But to Elsie there was masculinity in the shelter of his narrow, drooping shoulders, as he stood before her in his crumpled light overcoat, every now and then shifting from one foot to the other.
She followed him step by step, pulling her hair into place under the tam-o'-shanter, and settling it at its customary rakish angle.
It was no longer raining, and a watery moon showed through a haze.
They dawdled as soon as they were out of the crowd, with linked arms and clasped hands.
"Swear you'll write to me, Elsie."