Then she laughed; she laughed as if she would never have done.  She laughed, first with her eyes, then with her throat, then with her whole body, shaking her head and rocking herself backwards and forwards.  She laughed till her hair came down, and he took it and smoothed it into two sleek straight bands, and tied them in a loose knot under her chin.

Then she stopped laughing.  Her face between the two tight sheaths of hair seemed to close and shrink to a thin sharp bud.  It closed and opened again, it grew nearer and bigger, it bent forward and put out its mouth (for it had a mouth, this extraordinary flower) and kissed him.

“I sy, it’s nearly one o’clock,” said she.  “You’ve got to clear out of this.  Come!”

She rose; she stood before him holding out her hands to help him to get up and go.  She laughed again.  She laughed wide-mouthed, her head flung back, her face foreshortened, her white throat swelled and quivering—­the abandoned figure of Low Comedy incarnate.  But that was not what he saw.

To him it was as if the dark, impenetrable world had suddenly unfolded, had blossomed and flowered in the rose of her mouth; as if all the roses of all the world went to make up the petals of that rose.  Her body was nothing but a shining, transparent vessel for the fire of life.  It ran over; it leapt from her; the hands she stretched out to him were two shallow lamps that could hardly hold the tall, upward shooting, wind-tortured splendour of the flame.

He rose unsteadily to his feet.  The movement, being somewhat complicated, brought him within a yard of his own figure as presented in one of the long mirrors.  He stood there, arrested, fascinated, shocked by that person in the mirror.  The face he was accustomed to see in mirrors was grave, and not high coloured, and it always kept its mouth shut.  This person’s face was very red, and his mouth was slightly open, a detail he noticed with a peculiar disgust.  He could not get away from it, either.  It was held there, illuminated, insisted on, repeated for ever and ever, smaller and smaller, an endless procession of faces, all animated by one frenzy and one flame.  He was appalled by this mysterious multiplication of his person, and by the flushed and brilliant infamy of his face.  The face was the worst; he thought he had never seen anything so detestable as the face.  He sat down and hid it in his hands.

“Poor Rickets,” said Poppy softly.  She drew his hands from his face by a finger at a time.

“Oh, Ricky-ticky, you are such a rum little fellow.  I suppose that’s why I like you.  But for the life of me I can’t think why I kissed you; unless it was to say Good-night.”

A kiss more or less was nothing to Poppy.  And that one, she felt, had been valedictory.  She had kissed, not Ricky-ticky, but his dying Innocence, the boy in him.  And she had really wanted him to go.

The house was stiller than ever.  The canary had tucked his head under his wing and gone to sleep again.  Out of the silence the clock of St. Pancras Church struck one.