"Swear you'll write to me, Elsie."
"All right."
"Lordy, to think of all we might have done together these three months I've been here, and I've never had more than a word with you here and there!"
"I was at school all the time, till last week."
"You aren't going back to school again?"
"No, that's over, praise be! I'm supposed to be taking up typing and shorthand, some time, though there's plenty for two of us to do at home, I should have said."
The faint reverberations of a church clock striking came to them.
"Goodness, that's never eleven o'clock striking! Well, you will get me into a row and no mistake!"
She began to run, but stopped under a lamp just before No. 15 was in sight.
He had kept pace with her high-heeled, uneven steps easily, and stopped beside her.
"Say good-night to me properly, then."
"How, properly? Good-night, Mr. Roberts, and thank you ever so much. Oh, and bonne voyage to-morrow, in case I don't see you. Will that do?"
"No, it won't. I want a kiss."
"You don't want much, do you?" she began halfheartedly, and looking up and down the street as she spoke.
It was empty but for themselves.
Roberts caught hold of her and kissed her with violence. Unresisting, Elsie put back her head and closed her eyes.
"Kiss me—you shall kiss me," he gasped.
At the sense of constriction that came upon her with the tightened grasp of his arms, Elsie gave a fluttering, strangled scream and began to struggle.
"Let me go! You're hurting me!"
He loosened his hold so abruptly that she nearly fell down.
She began to hurry towards home, moving with the ugly, jerking gait peculiar to women who walk from the knees.
"Shall I see you to-morrow before I go?" His voice sounded oddly humble and crestfallen.
"I'll come to the drawing-room for a minute—no one's ever there in the mornings."
"What time, Elsie? I ought to be off at nine."
"Oh, before that some time, I expect. I say, you've got your key, haven't you?"
A sharp misgiving assailed her as he began to fumble in his pockets.
"Yes, all right." He put it into the lock.
Elsie, relieved, stood on tiptoe and put her arms round his neck. "Good-night, you dear," she whispered. "Now don't begin again. Open the door and go in first, and if the coast isn't clear, just cough, and I'll wait a bit. I'll see you to-morrow."
When he signed to her that the house was quiet, and that she could safely enter, Elsie slipped past him like a shadow while he felt about for matches, and flew upstairs. Her mother slept in the back bedroom on the third floor, and Elsie saw that her door was shut and that no streak of light showed under it. Satisfied, she went up the next flight of stairs to the bedroom.
Geraldine, of course, was bound to know of her escapade, but Geraldine would either believe, or pretend to believe, that Elsie had been with Irene Tidmarsh.and the two Palmer girls always combined with one another against the sentimentalised tyranny that Mrs. Palmer called " a mother's rights."
Geraldine was lying in bed, reading a paper novelette by the light of a candle stuck into an empty medicine bottle that stood on a chair beside her. She looked sallower than ever now that she had undressed and put on a white flannelette nightgown with a frill high at the neck and another one at each wrist.
Her lank hair was rolled up into steel waving-pins. It was one of Geraldine's grievances that she should be obliged to go to bed in curlers every night, while Elsie's light curls lay loose and ruffled on her pillow. Sometimes, when they were on friendly terms, she and Elsie would speculate together as to how the difficulty could be overcome when Geraldine married, and could no longer go to bed and wake up " looking a sight."
She rolled over as Elsie cautiously opened the door. "You've come at last, have you? How did you get in?"
"Mr. Roberts let me in. He knew I'd be late to-night," said Elsie calmly, beginning to pull off her clothes.
"You've got a nerve, I must say. Mother thinks you were in bi d ages ago. She came up after supper and said you were in the kitchen. She was in the drawing-room nearly all the evening, doing the polite to the Williamses."
"Did she find out that supper hadn't been cleared away?"
"I suppose she didn't, or she'd have been up here after you. You're in luck, young Elsie."
"I shall have to go down and do it first thing to-morrow before she's down," said Elsie, yawning.
"Where have you been?"
"Pictures."
"With Ireen?"
"'M."
"I shall ask her what they were like, next time I see her," said Geraldine significantly.
Elsie pulled the ribbon off her hair without untying it, shuffled her clothes off on to the floor from beneath a nightgown that was the counterpart of her sister's, and dabbed at her face with a sponge dipped in cold water. She carefully parted her hair on the other side for the night, and brushed it vigorously for some moments to promote growth, but the worn bristles of her wooden-backed brush were grey with dust and thick with ancient " combings."
At the bedside Elsie knelt down for a few seconds with her face hidden in her hands, as she had always done, muttered an unthinking formula, and got into bed.
"You're very sociable, I must say," Geraldine exclaimed. "Out half the night, and not a word to say when you do come up!"
"I thought you had a headache."
"A lot you care about my headache."
"I'm going to put the light out now."
"All right."
They had always shared a bedroom and never exchanged formal good-nights.
In the dark, a tremendous weariness suddenly came over Elsie. She felt thankful to be in her warm, narrow bed, and blissfully relived the evening's experience.
She found that she could thrill profoundly to the memory of those ardent moments, and even the bodily lassitude that overwhelmed her held a certain luxuriousness.
Dimly, and without any conscious analysis, she felt that for the first time in her sixteen years of life she had glimpsed a reason why she should exist. It was for this that she had been made.
No thought of the future preoccupied her for a moment. She did not even regret that Norman Roberts should be going away next day.
"I must get up in good time to-morrow, and get a word with him in the drawing-room before he's off," was her last waking thought.
But she was sleeping profoundly, her head under the bedclothes, when Mrs. Palmer's customary bang at the door sounded next morning soon after six o'clock.
"Wake up, girls."
"Aw-right!" Geraldine shouted back sleepily. If one or other of them did not call out in reply, Mrs. Palmer would come into the room in her grey dressing-gown and vigorously shake the bed-posts of either bed.
They could hear her heelless slippers flapping away again, and Elsie reluctantly roused herself.
"I simply must clear that supper-table before mother goes down," she thought. Still half asleep, and yawning without restraint, she put on her thick coat over her nightgown, and ran downstairs with bare feet.
The broken remains of supper, even to Elsie's indifferent eyes, looked horrible in the grim morning light.