His male breadth blocked the door.  She smiled to see how huge he was, and stood obediently in the silence he evidently desired, for he neither greeted her nor made any movement to enter, but remained looking down into her face.  His deep breath measured some long space of time.  Her eyes wandered past him and to the little huddled houses, the laurels standing round the lamp, their leaves bobbing under the straight silver rake of the lamplit rain; and she marvelled that these things looked as they had always looked on any night.

“Come out, I want to see you,” he whispered at last, and his hand closing on her drew her out of the dark hall.  She liked the wetness of the flags under her stockinged feet, the fall of the rain on her face.

“You little thing!  You little thing!” he muttered:  and then, “I love you.”

Her head drooped.  She lifted it bravely.

“Ellen!  Ellen!” He repeated the name in a passion of wonder, till, feeling the raindrops on her head, he exclaimed urgently, “But you’re getting wet!  Darling, let us go in.”

When he had shut the front door and they were left alone in the dark, and she was free from the compulsion of his beauty and the intent gaze he had set on her face, she tried to seize her life’s last chance of escape.  She wrenched away her wrist and made a timid hostile noise.  But he linked his arm in hers and whispered reassuringly, “I love you,” and drew her, since there was a light there, into the kitchen.  He put his hat down on the table beside her plate and cup and threw his wet coat across a chair, while she said querulously, sobbingly, “Why do you call me little?  I am not little!”

He took her hands in his; her inky fingers were intertwined with his fingers, long and stained with strange stains, massive and powerful and yet tremulous.  The sight and touch filled her with extraordinary joy and terror.  At last things were beginning to happen to her, and she did not know if she had strength enough to support it.  If she could have countermanded her destiny she would, although she knew from the rich colour that tinged this moment, in spite of her inadequacy, it was going to be of some high kind of glory.

He took her in his arms.  His lips, brushing her ear, asked, “Do you love me?  Tell me, tell me, do you love me?” Dreamily, incredulously, she listened to that strong heart-beat which she had imagined.  But he pressed her.  “Ellen, be kind!  Tell me, do you love me?” That was cruel of him.  She was not sure that she approved of love.  The position of women being what it was.  Men were tyrants, and they seemed to be able to make their wives ignoble.  Married women were often anti-Suffragists; they were often fat; they never seemed to go out long walks in the hills or to write poetry.  She laid her hands flat against his chest and pushed away from him.  “No!” she whimpered.  But he bent on her a face wolfish with a hunger that was nevertheless sweet-tempered,