"The earnest trumpet spake, and silver thrills From kissing cymbals made a merry din—­“

The words seemed to move on the page.  In her eyes another light than the firelight seemed to play.  Her breast rose, and in her thick white throat a little inarticulate sound twanged.

“Eh?  Did you speak, Bessie?” Ed asked, stopping in his buttering of bread.

“Eh?...  No.”

In answering, her head had turned for a moment, and she had seen him.  Suddenly it struck her with force:  what a shaving of a man he was!  Desk-chested, weak-necked, conscious of his little “important” lip and chin—­yes, he needed a Polytechnic gymnastic course!  Then she remarked how once, at Margate, she had seen him in the distance, as in a hired baggy bathing-dress he had bathed from a machine, in muddy water, one of a hundred others, all rather cold, flinging a polo-ball about and shouting stridently.  “A sound mind in a sound body!"...  He was rather vain of his neat shoes, too, and doubtless stunted his feet; and she had seen the little spot on his neck caused by the chafing of his collar-stud....  No, she did not want him to touch her, just now at any rate.  His touch would be too like a betrayal of another touch ... somewhere, sometime, somehow ... in that tantalising dream that refused to allow itself either to be fully remembered or quite forgotten.  What was that dream?  What was it?...

She continued to gaze into the fire.

Of a sudden she sprang to her feet with a choked cry of almost animal fury.  The fool had touched her.  Carried away doubtless by the memory of that afternoon by the windmill, he had, in passing once more to the kettle, crept softly behind her and put a swift burning kiss on the side of her neck.

Then he had retreated before her, stumbling against the table and causing the cups and saucers to jingle.

The basket-chair tilted up, but righted itself again.

“I told you—­I told you—­” she choked, her stockish figure shaking with rage, “I told you—­you—­”

He put up his elbow as if to ward off a blow.

“You touch me—­you!—­you!” the words broke from her.

He had put himself farther round the table.  He stammered.

“Here—­dash it all, Bessie—­what is the matter?”

“You touch me!”

“All right,” he said sullenly.  “I won’t touch you again—­no fear.  I didn’t know you were such a firebrand.  All right, drop it now.  I won’t again.  Good Lord!”

Slowly the white fist she had drawn back sank to her side again.

“All right now,” he continued to grumble resentfully.  “You needn’t take on so.  It’s said—­I won’t touch you again.”  Then, as if he remembered that after all she was ill and must be humoured, he began, while her bosom still rose and fell rapidly, to talk with an assumption that nothing much had happened.  “Come, sit down again, Bessie.  The tea’s in the pot and I’ll have it ready in a couple of jiffs.  What a ridiculous little girl you are, to take on like that!...  And I say, listen!  That’s a muffin-bell, and there’s a grand fire for toast!  You sit down while I run out and get ’em.  Give me your key, so I can let myself in again—­”