But indeed the Thames was a wonderful sight that year! ice-fringed along either shore, and with drift-ice in the middle reflecting a luminous scarlet from the broad red setting sun, and moving steadily, incessantly seaward.  A swarm of mewing gulls went to and fro, and with them mingled pigeons and crows.  The buildings on the Surrey side were dim and grey and very mysterious, the moored, ice-blocked barges silent and deserted, and here and there a lit window shone warm.  The sun sank right out of sight into a bank of blue, and the Surrey side dissolved in mist save for a few insoluble, spots of yellow light, that presently became many.  And after our lovers had come under Charing Cross Bridge the Houses of Parliament rose before them at the end of a great crescent of golden lamps, blue and faint, halfway between the earth and sky.  And the clock on the Tower was like a November sun.

It was a day without a flaw, or at most but the slightest speck.  And that only came at the very end.

“Good-bye, dear,” she said.  “I have been very happy to-day.”

His face came very close to hers.  “Good-bye,” he said, pressing her hand and looking into her eyes.

She glanced round, she drew nearer to him. “Dearest one,” she whispered very softly, and then, “Good-bye.”

Suddenly he became unaccountably petulant, he dropped her hand.  “It’s always like this.  We are happy. I am happy.  And then—­then you are taken away....”

There was a silence of mute interrogations.

“Dear,” she whispered, “we must wait.”

A moment’s pause. “Wait!” he said, and broke off.  He hesitated.  “Good-bye,” he said as though he was snapping a thread that held them together.

CHAPTER XVI.

MISS HEYDINGER’S PRIVATE THOUGHTS.

The way from Chelsea to Clapham and the way from South Kensington to Battersea, especially if the former is looped about a little to make it longer, come very near to each other.  One night close upon Christmas two friends of Lewisham’s passed him and Ethel.  But Lewisham did not see them, because he was looking at Ethel’s face.

“Did you see?” said the other girl, a little maliciously.

“Mr. Lewisham—­wasn’t it?” said Miss Heydinger in a perfectly indifferent tone.

* * * * *

Miss Heydinger sat in the room her younger sisters called her “Sanctum.”  Her Sanctum was only too evidently an intellectualised bedroom, and a cheap wallpaper of silvery roses peeped coquettishly from among her draped furniture.  Her particular glories were the writing-desk in the middle and the microscope on the unsteady octagonal table under the window.  There were bookshelves of workmanship patently feminine in their facile decoration and structural instability, and on them an array of glittering poets, Shelley, Rossetti, Keats, Browning, and odd volumes