“The dinner will be enough, Osborn.  Oh! it will be lovely!”

“Righto!” he said.  “I—­I do wish I could take you out oftener, but you know—­”

“Of course I know, Osborn.”

She thought with excitement of the charming few hours which they would snatch from routine, together, a fortnight hence.  She spoke of it to Mrs. Amber, carelessly, with a high-beating heart and secret, delicious thrills:  “We’re dining out on my birthday, mother, if you won’t mind spending the evening here in case the children wake.”

“Oh, duck!” cried Mrs. Amber, “oh, my love!  I’ll be delighted.  Mind you enjoy yourselves very much and don’t hurry home.  Grandmothers are made to be useful.”

Nearly every spare minute of every day during those intervening weeks Marie spent in renovating a frock.  She had vast ideas, but no money except a few shillings hoarded only a woman knows how, in spite of the pressing claims of the greasy books.  Her wedding frock, four years old, emerged from the tissue paper where it had lain these many months, yellowed and soiled, in dire need of the cleaner’s ministrations or the dyer’s art.  Marie could not afford the cleaner, and did not dare the wash-tub and soap, but she bought one of those fourpenny-ha’penny dyes with which impecunious women achieve amazing results, wherewith she dyed the frock, and the bath, and her own hands a shade of blue satisfactory at least by artificial light.  Under it she would wear the purple petticoat, whose flounces would cause the skirt to sway and swing in the present mode, and she would evolve herself a hat.  She folded a newspaper round, shaped it to her head, covered it with black velvet, borrowed a great old cameo clasp of her mother’s, and had a turban, a saucy thing whose rake brought back for a while the lamp to her eyes and the rose to her cheek.  The housemaid’s gloves and the rubber gloves had never been renewed, and the supply of Julia’s wornout suedes could not cope with the destruction of them at No. 30, so that Marie’s fine hands were fine no longer.  They were reddened and roughened and thickened like the hands of other household women, but each afternoon in the slow fortnight she sat down to careful manicuring.  When the result of these pains was fulfilled; when she stood before the glass in her pink bedroom gasping at her reflection, she could have sung and danced and wept in this glad renewal of her youth.

She had rendezvous with Osborn at the chosen restaurant at seven.  Never, it seemed to her, had she felt lighter-footed and lighter-hearted.  It was as if the old days were back, the old days when an unlessoned girl met an unlessoned man to dream of heaven together, in some restaurant room full of the lessons and sophistries of love.  Westwards she travelled by Tube, emerged at Leicester Square, and walked on flying feet past the Haymarket, across the great stream of traffic at the top, into Shaftesbury Avenue, and into the foyer