“Not a right.  Of course, if I’d met you in Bond Street, all sleek and polished, I shouldn’t have dreamed of butting in.  I should have said to myself, ’Well, that’s the end of the little Robert Stonehouse saga as far as I’m concerned,’ and I don’t suppose I should ever have thought of you again.  But now I shall have to go on thinking—­and wondering what happened—­and worrying.”  She drew her cloak closer about her like a bird folding its wings, and added prosaically:  “I say, don’t you find it rather cold standing about here?”

He turned with her and walked on sullenly, his head down to the wind.  He thought:  “I shall tell her nothing at all.”  But to his astonishment she was silent, and finally he had to speak himself.

“I’m afraid this silly business has broken up your party.  Or was it getting too lively for you?  Howard’s beanos used to have a considerable reputation.”

“He often seems drunk when he isn’t,” she returned tranquilly.  “I think it’s because he enjoys things more than most people are able to.  It wasn’t that.  I wanted to see you so much, and I knew Brown’s would be closing about now.  So I sent them to a theatre.  It seemed the safest place.”

“And they went like lambs.  But, then, the Banditti always did.”

“Oh, the Banditti!” He guessed that she was smiling to herself.  “The Banditti wouldn’t have grown up like that.  They were much too nice—­never quite really wicked, were they?  Just carried off their feet.  Still, they were never quite the same after you left.  I think they always hankered a little after the good old days when they rang door-hells and chivied their governesses.  Probably they will never be so happy again.”

“They had you.  It was you they really cared about.  Everybody did what you liked.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did—­in the end.”

It was odd that they should be both thinking of that last encounter and that they should speak of it so guardedly, as though it were still a delicate matter.

“I didn’t know you were never coming again.  I waited for you in the afternoon—­for weeks and weeks.”

“Did you?” He looked at her quickly, taken off his guard, and then away again with a scornful laugh.  “Oh, I don’t believe it.  You knew I wasn’t nice—­not your sort.  You’re just making it up.”

“I wonder why you say that?” she asked dispassionately.  “It’s cheap and stupid.  You’re not really stupid and you weren’t cheap, even if you weren’t nice.  And you know that I don’t tell lies.”

For a moment he was too startled and too ashamed to answer.  Cheap.  That was just the word for it.  The sort of thing that common young men said to their common young women.  And, of course, he did know.  Her integrity was a thing you felt.  But he could never bring himself to tell her that he had been afraid to believe too easily, or that he did not want to have to remember her afterwards, waiting there day by day, in their deserted playground.  It troubled him already, like a vague, indefinite pain.