Row after row of dim, pale, intent faces became gradually visible, stretching far back-into complete obscurity; thousands, tens of thousands of faces, it seemed—­for the Imperial de Luxe was demonstrating that Saturday night its claim to be “the fashionable rage of Bursley.”  Then mysterious laughter rippled in the gloom, and loud guffaws shot up out of the rippling.  Rachel saw nothing whatever to originate this mirth until an attendant in black with a tiny white apron loomed upon them out of the darkness, and, beckoning them forward, bent down, and indicated two empty places at the end of a row, and the great white scintillating screen of the cinema came into view.  Instead of being at the extremity it was at the beginning of the auditorium.  And as Rachel took her seat she saw on the screen—­which was scarcely a dozen feet away—­a man kneeling at the end of a canal-lock, and sucking up the water of the canal through a hose-pipe; and this astoundingly thirsty man drank with such rapidity that the water, with huge boats floating on it, subsided at the rate of about a foot a second, and the drinker waxed enormously in girth.  The laughter grew uproarious.  Rachel herself gave a quick, uncontrolled, joyous laugh, and it was as if the laugh had been drawn out of her violently unawares.  Louis Fores also laughed very heartily.

“Cute idea, that!” he whispered.

When the film was cut off Rachel wanted to take back her laugh.  She felt a little ashamed of having laughed at anything so silly.

“How absurd!” she murmured, trying to be serious.

Nevertheless she was in bliss.  She surrendered herself to the joy of life, as to a new sensation.  She was intoxicated, ravished, bewildered, and quite careless.  Perhaps for the first time in her adult existence she lived without reserve or preoccupation completely in and for the moment.  Moreover the hearty laughter of Louis Fores helped to restore her dignity.  If the spectacle was good enough for him, with all his knowledge of the world, to laugh at, she need not blush for its effect on herself.  And in another ten seconds, when the swollen man, staggering along a wide thoroughfare, was run down by an automobile and squashed flat, while streams of water inundated the roadway, she burst again into free laughter, and then looked round at Louis, who at the same instant looked round at her, and they exchanged an intimate smiling glance.  It seemed to Rachel that they were alone and solitary in the crowded interior, and that they shared exactly the same tastes and emotions and comprehended one another profoundly and utterly; her confidence in him, at that instant, was absolute, and enchanting to her.  Half a minute later the emaciated man was in a room and being ecstatically kissed by a most beautiful and sweetly shameless girl in a striped shirtwaist; it was a very small room, and the furniture was close upon the couple, giving the scene an air of delightful privacy.  And then the scene was blotted out and gay music rose lilting from some unseen cave in front of the screen.